What evidence do auditors commonly ask for on PSS-11 Images for Virtual Machines and Containers?

Customer facing setting restricting which images users are permitted to launch; Release notes describing what changed between successive provider supplied images; Hardening baseline and build evidence for one provider supplied image; Catalogue showing the approved image set made available to a tenant.

What is the most common gap auditors find on PSS-11?

Image restriction applies in the console while other launch paths ignore it

BSI C5 (121-criteria catalogue) · C5: Product Safety and Security

`PSS-11` Images for Virtual Machines and Containers

Where customers run virtual machines or containers, let the customer restrict which images its users may launch, inform the customer of what changed between versions of any images the provider supplies, and harden those provider supplied images to generally accepted industry standards.

Source: BSI C5 (121-criteria catalogue), PSS-11. The statement above is our statement of the clause, read from the published text and cited so you can check it against the official text, not the instrument verbatim. Open BSI C5 (121-criteria catalogue) in the compliance library.

The edition of the catalogue is not stamped here; check the edition your attestation is issued against.

artefacts

held by a system

at each review

hard

to go live

Document repository

where the evidence lives

teal = a system already holds it · olive = produced at each review. To go live: easy when half or more of the artefacts are already held by a system, moderate from a quarter to a half, hard below a quarter.

These are the artefacts auditors commonly ask for on this requirement, our guidance rather than text from the standard. Your assessor decides what is sufficient in your context, and asks for samples across the period when a report covers one.

system holds itEvidence a system already holds

none for this control

periodic reviewEvidence produced at each review

Release notes describing what changed between successive provider supplied images · Source control / CI pipeline
Hardening baseline and build evidence for one provider supplied image · Cloud console / configuration management

governing documentDocuments that govern the control

Customer facing setting restricting which images users are permitted to launch · Document repository
Catalogue showing the approved image set made available to a tenant · Document repository

First move

No system holds this evidence for you: it is people and documents. Reminders and routing to the owner still save time. Put the document under version control with an owner and review date, and log each review as a record with reviewer and date.

Common gaps auditors find

Image restriction applies in the console while other launch paths ignore it
New image versions published with no statement of what changed
Provider images shipped with default accounts and unnecessary services enabled
Hardening applied at first build and not maintained across later rebuilds

Do this for your whole sheet

Paste the rows you run your controls from and get this mapping for every control at once, with the periodic-review ones flagged and a first move per row. No account for the first run.

Build my evidence sheet

PSS-10 Software Defined Networking · PSS-12 Locations of Data Processing and Storage