SC.L2-3.13.2  

Reference: CMMC v2.13

Family: SC

Level Introduced: 2

Title: Security Engineering

Practice:
Employ architectural designs, software development techniques, and systems engineering principles that promote effective information security within organizational systems.

Further Discussion:
Familiarity with security engineering principles and their successful application to your infrastructure will increase the security of your environment. NIST SP 800-160 System Security Engineering: Considerations for a Multidisciplinary Approach in the Engineering of Trustworthy Secure Systems can serve as a source of security engineering and design principles.

Decide which designs and principles to apply. Some will not be possible or appropriate for a given company or for specific systems or components.

Designs and principles should be applied to policies and security standards. Starting with the baseline configuration, they should be extended through all layers of the technology stack (e.g., hardware, software, firmware) and throughout all the components of the infrastructure. The application of these chosen designs and principles should drive you towards a secure architecture with the required security capabilities and intrinsic behaviors present throughout the lifecycle of your technology.

As legacy components age, it may become increasingly difficult for those components to meet security principles and requirements. This should factor into life-cycle decisions for those components (e.g., replacing legacy hardware, upgrading or re-writing software, upgrading run-time environments).

Example You are responsible for developing strategies to protect data and harden your infrastructure. You are on a team responsible for performing a major upgrade to a legacy system. You refer to your documented security engineering principles [c]. Reviewing each, you decide which are appropriate and applicable [c]. You apply the chosen designs and principles when creating your design for the upgrade [f].

You document the security requirements for the software and hardware changes to ensure the principles are followed. You review the upgrade at critical points in the workflow to ensure the requirements are met. You assist in updating the policies covering the use of the upgraded system so user behavior stays aligned with the principles.

Potential Assessment Considerations
• Does the organization have a defined system architecture [a,d]?
• Are system security engineering principles applied in the specification, design, development and implementation of the systems [d,e,f]?

Source: CMMC v2.13