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KSI-CNA-RNTRestricting Network Traffic

LOW
MODERATE

Formerly KSI-CNA-01

>Control Description

Persistently ensure all machine-based information resources are configured to limit inbound and outbound network traffic.
Defined terms:
Information Resource
Machine-Based (information resources)
Persistently

>NIST 800-53 Controls

>Trust Center Components
3

Ways to express your implementation of this indicator — approaches vary by organization size, complexity, and data sensitivity.

From the field: Mature implementations express network resilience through redundancy metrics and chaos engineering results — not just network architecture diagrams. Automated failure injection testing validates redundant paths, and network monitoring dashboards show real-time availability across all network segments.

Network Architecture Diagram

Architecture & Diagrams

Network topology expressing segmentation, redundancy, and traffic flow patterns

Network Availability Metrics

Dashboards

Dashboard expressing network health — uptime, latency, throughput, and redundancy status across all segments

Network Resilience Testing

Evidence Artifacts

Chaos engineering or failure injection test results — evidence that resilience is tested, not just designed

Manual: Review chaos engineering test results and network failover measurements

>Programmatic Queries

Beta
Cloud

CLI Commands

Describe security group rules
aws ec2 describe-security-group-rules --filter "Name=group-id,Values=<sg-id>" --query "SecurityGroupRules[].{Direction:IsEgress,Protocol:IpProtocol,FromPort:FromPort,ToPort:ToPort,CIDR:CidrIpv4}" --output table
List network ACLs
aws ec2 describe-network-acls --query "NetworkAcls[].{Id:NetworkAclId,VPC:VpcId,Rules:Entries | length(@)}" --output table

>20x Assessment Focus Areas

Aligned with FedRAMP 20x Phase Two assessment methodology

Completeness & Coverage:

  • Do network traffic restrictions apply to all machine-based resources — including containers, serverless functions, managed services, and CI/CD build agents?
  • Are both inbound and outbound traffic restrictions defined and enforced, or is outbound traffic less restricted than inbound?
  • How do you ensure resources in all environments (production, staging, development) have appropriate traffic restrictions, not just production?
  • Are there resources with overly permissive network rules (e.g., 0.0.0.0/0 ingress or egress) that are documented as exceptions?

Automation & Validation:

  • What automated policy checks prevent deployment of resources with overly permissive network configurations (e.g., open security groups, unrestricted NACLs)?
  • How do you detect when a network rule is modified to be more permissive than intended — is the change automatically reverted or flagged?
  • What happens when a legitimate application needs network access that current restrictions block — how do you handle the exception without weakening the overall posture?
  • Do you run automated network reachability analysis to verify that resources can only communicate with their intended destinations?

Inventory & Integration:

  • What tools enforce network restrictions (security groups, network policies, firewall rules, service mesh), and how do they coordinate across your architecture?
  • How do you maintain an inventory of all network rules and their justifications, and is this inventory programmatically generated from IaC?
  • How do network restriction configurations integrate with your CMDB to ensure every resource has an associated network policy?
  • Are network flow logs analyzed to identify traffic patterns that should be restricted but are not?

Continuous Evidence & Schedules:

  • How do you demonstrate that network traffic restrictions have been consistently enforced over the past 90 days?
  • Is network compliance data (rule sets, violation counts, flow log analysis) available via API or dashboard for ongoing assessment?
  • How do you detect network restriction drift — rules that were tightened but later loosened — between review cycles?
  • What evidence shows network flow logs have been analyzed for unauthorized traffic patterns and anomalies?

Update History

2026-02-04Removed italics and changed the ID as part of new standardization in v0.9.0-beta; no material changes.

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