What is OSCAL?
The Open Security Controls Assessment Language (OSCAL) is a machine-readable language that simplifies and standardizes information system security assessments through the exchange of information via automation. Originally developed by the National Institutes of Standards and Technology in collaboration with FedRAMP and industry, OSCAL aims to improve the efficiency, timeliness, accuracy, and consistency of system security assessments.
Streamlining, Standardizing, and Improving Security Assessments
The standardized formats provided by the OSCAL project help to streamline and standardize the processes of documenting, implementing, and assessing security controls. The automation enabled by the OSCAL formats reduces complexity, decreases implementation costs, and enables the simultaneous, continuous assessment of a system’s security against multiple sets of requirements. Additionally, paperwork will be significantly reduced.
OSCAL addresses several challenges around security controls and security control assessment.
Challenges Addressed
Standardizing Control Information
Security controls and profiles are currently represented largely in proprietary ways. In many cases they are written in prose documents that are imprecise, leading to differences in interpretation, and are not machine-readable; meaning that the instructions require someone to manually implement the control in systems for the tool to use the information.
Assessing Control Implementations Across Multiple Components
Organizations are also struggling with systems that have many different components. Some components require the use of different profiles per component; this is commonly the case with cloud environments. Also, systems can be multi-tenant or have mixed ownership of components -- often referred to as shared responsibility. Information system owners need to be able to assess the security of these systems against their specific requirements and to simultaneously provide these views to their stakeholders.
Supporting Multiple Regulatory Frameworks Simultaneously
In addition, there are situations where a single system needs to support multiple regulatory frameworks. For example, the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs is a federal agency operating with multiple sets of regulatory frameworks together: the Federal Information Security Modernization Act (FISMA); the NIST Cybersecurity Risk Management Framework; requirements relating to the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA); and others relating to secure credit card transactions based on the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS). This situation can be complicated.
Documentation Reviews and Control Assessments are Largely Manual Processes
Because the definition and assessment of all these security controls is so complex, it is largely a manual process. The OSCAL project seeks to change this situation by offering standardized representations for controls and their implementation in a system, which can be used by both humans and machines for development, analysis, and reporting. We need formats that can be generated by machines for communicating with other machines but can also be easily reformatted so humans can read the information. By standardizing the representation of this information with a well-defined specification, OSCAL information is interoperable. The goal is to keep OSCAL as simple as possible while enabling extensive automation in vendor tools.
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