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Towards Automated Assessment of Organizational Cybersecurity Posture in Cloud

Published: 04 January 2023 Publication History

Abstract

In a world where reliance on digital services becomes more critical every year with billions of dollars in penalties being levied annually by regulators and the impacts from security control failures growing, the potential consequence of organizations being unable to determine the completeness of their cybersecurity strategy and control environment are worsening. Established standards such as NIST 800-53, Cloud Security Alliance Cloud Controls Matrix (CSA-CCM) and CIS 20 Security Controls offer baselines against which organizations can mandate compliance, in the support of managing their security control environment and meeting risk and regulatory expectations. While there is increased security and compliance automation, it is hampered by the fact that control requirements are expressed in natural language text. With large organizations often needing to comply with several thousand security requirements across their IT enterprise, it becomes humanly impossible to assess coverage and identify potential gaps.
In this paper, we present a system that enables performing a coarse-grained assessment of an organization’s security posture, against a standard control framework. We propose an AI-based model for performing the mapping automatically and evaluate its performance empirically. We further develop the idea and employ a novel domain-specific taxonomy that enhances the granularity of the coverage assessment while providing explainability. We also describe how this system is being used in production.

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cover image ACM Other conferences
CODS-COMAD '23: Proceedings of the 6th Joint International Conference on Data Science & Management of Data (10th ACM IKDD CODS and 28th COMAD)
January 2023
357 pages
ISBN:9781450397971
DOI:10.1145/3570991
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Published: 04 January 2023

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Author Tags

  1. cloud security
  2. mapping
  3. regulations
  4. security and compliance

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CODS-COMAD 2023

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Overall Acceptance Rate 197 of 680 submissions, 29%

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