Support for NIST 800-53?

#f5friday There’s an iApp for that!

NIST publication 800-53 is a standard defined to help government agencies (and increasingly enterprises) rein in sprawling security requirements while maintaining a solid grip on the lockdown lever. It defines the concept of a “security control” that ranges from physical security to AAA, and then subdivides controls into “common” – those used frequently across an organization, “custom” – those defined explicitly for use by a single application or device, and “hybrid” – those that start with a common control and then customize it for the needs of a specific application or device. The standard lists literally hundreds of controls, their purpose, and when they’re needed. When these controls are “common”, they can be reused by multiple applications or devices.

For government entities and their contractors, this standard is not optional, but there is a lot of good in here for everyone else also. Of course external access to applications should be considered, allowed or not, and if allowed, locked down to only those who absolutely need it. That is the type of thing you’ll find in the common controls, and any enterprise could benefit from studying and understanding the standard.

For applications, using this standard and the ones it is based off of, IT can develop a security checklist. The thing is that for hardware devices, support is very difficult from the outside. It is far better if the device – particularly networking devices that run outside of the application context – implement the information security portions internally.

And F5 BIG-IP does. With an iApp. No doubt you’ve heard us talk about how great we think iApps are, well now we have a solid example to point out, where we use it to configure the objects that allow access to our own device. Since iApps are excellent at manipulating data heading for an application, the fact that BIG-IP UI is a web application should make it easy to understand how we quickly built support for 800-53 through development of an iApp that configures all of the right objects/settings for you, if you but answer a few questions.

800-53 is a big standard, and iApps were written with the intent that they configure objects that BIG-IP manipulates more than the BIG-IP configuration objects themselves, so there are a couple of caveats in the free downloadable iApp – check the help section after you install and before you configure the iApp. But even if the caveats affect you, they are not show-stoppers that invalidate compliance with the standard, so the iApp is still useful for you.

One of my co-workers was kind enough to give me a couple of enhanced screenshots to share with you, if you already know you need to support this standard in your organization, these will show you the type of support we’ve built. If you’re not sure whether you’ll be supporting 800-53, they’re still pretty information-packed and you’ll get why I say this stuff is useful for any organization.

The thing is that this iApp is not designed as a “Yes, now you can check that box” solution, it aims to actually give you control over who has access to the BIG-IP system and how they have access, from where, while utilizing the language and format of the standard. All of these things can be done without the iApp, but this tool makes it far easier to implement and maintain compliance because under the covers it changes several necessary settings for you, and you do not have to search down each individual object and configure it by hand.

The iApp is free. iApp support is built into BIG-IP. If you need to comply with the standard for regulatory reasons, or have decided as an organization to comply, download it and install. Then  run the iApp and off you go to configuration land.

Note that this iApp makes changes to the configuration of your BIG-IP. It should be used by knowledgeable staff that are aware of how their choices will impact the existing BIG-IP configuration.

Published Feb 24, 2012
Version 1.0