National Checklist Program for IT Products: Guidelines for Checklist Users and Developers

A security configuration checklist is a document that contains instructions or procedures for configuring an information technology (IT) product to an operational environment, for verifying that the product has been configured properly, and/or for identifying unauthorized changes to the product. Using these checklists can minimize the attack surface, reduce vulnerabilities, lessen the impact of successful attacks, and identify changes that might otherwise go undetected. To facilitate development of checklists and to make checklists more organized and usable, NIST established the National Checklist Program (NCP). This publication explains how to use the NCP to find and retrieve checklists, and it also describes the policies, procedures, and general requirements for participation in the NCP.