What evidence do auditors commonly ask for on SC-7 Boundary Protection?

SSP SC-7 statement describing boundary protection devices, DMZ subnets for public components and managed interfaces; Boundary diagram and firewall rule review showing default deny; Network segmentation diagrams with VLAN and zone mapping; Denial of service protection configuration and capacity test results; Boundary protection architecture with firewall and proxy rule documentation; Cryptographic standards specifying approved algorithms and key lengths.

What is the most common gap auditors find on SC-7?

Firewall rule base contains stale allow any entries

FedRAMP High (NIST SP 800-53 Rev 5 baseline) · SC - System and Communications Protection

`SC-7` Boundary Protection

Monitor/control communications at external boundary and key internal boundaries; implement subnetworks for publicly accessible components.

Source: FedRAMP High (NIST SP 800-53 Rev 5 baseline), SC-7. 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 FedRAMP High (NIST SP 800-53 Rev 5 baseline) in the compliance library.

A FedRAMP baseline is a subset of NIST SP 800-53 Rev 5, enhancements included.

artefacts

held by a system

at each review

hard

to go live

Policy repository / GRC workspace

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

Denial of service protection configuration and capacity test results · Source control / CI pipeline

periodic reviewEvidence produced at each review

Boundary diagram and firewall rule review showing default deny · Cloud console / configuration management

governing documentDocuments that govern the control

SSP SC-7 statement describing boundary protection devices, DMZ subnets for public components and managed interfaces · Policy repository / GRC workspace
Network segmentation diagrams with VLAN and zone mapping · Policy repository / GRC workspace
Boundary protection architecture with firewall and proxy rule documentation · Policy repository / GRC workspace
Cryptographic standards specifying approved algorithms and key lengths · Policy repository / GRC workspace

First move

Mostly documents and reviews. Pull the 1 system-held artefact from your Source control / CI pipeline on a schedule; put the documents under version control with an owner and review date, and log each review as a dated record with a named reviewer.

Common gaps auditors find

Firewall rule base contains stale allow any entries
Internal traffic between services unencrypted within trusted zones
Legacy TLS versions remain enabled on external services

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

SC-5 Denial-of-Service Protection · SC-7(3) Access Points