A.5.15 Access control
Rules that govern both physical entry and logical access to information and associated assets are to be set and applied on the basis of business and information security requirements. Purpose (stated in ISO/IEC 27002:2022): ensures access to information and associated assets is authorized and unauthorized access is prevented. As an Annex A reference control, it is compared with the controls determined in risk treatment (6.1.3 c) and recorded in the Statement of Applicability as included or excluded, with the justification and implementation status (6.1.3 d); implementation guidance is ISO/IEC 27002:2022 5.15.
Source: ISO/IEC 27001:2022, A.5.15. 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 ISO/IEC 27001:2022 in the compliance library.
Clauses 4 to 10 are the management-system requirements: none of them can be excluded when an organisation claims conformity. The 93 Annex A controls are a reference set: one may be excluded with a justification in the Statement of Applicability. Certification bodies assess conformity; the evidence lists here are what auditors commonly ask for, not a list the standard prescribes.
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
- Evidence of a default-deny design in firewall rules, application roles and cloud IAM policies · Identity provider / directory
governing documentDocuments that govern the control
- Statement of Applicability entry for control A.5.15, showing inclusion or justified exclusion, implementation status and the risks it treats · Policy repository / GRC workspace
- The topic-specific access control policy, approved and communicated, reflecting owner-defined business and security requirements · Policy repository / GRC workspace
- Access control rules or role models mapping entities (users, services, devices) to rights, consistent with classification · Policy repository / GRC workspace
- Separation of request, approval and administration functions in the access management workflow · Document repository
First move
Common gaps auditors find
- The access control policy exists but is not reflected in actual system configurations
- Default-allow rules persist in network or cloud environments
- Non-human entities such as service accounts are left outside the access rules
- Access rights are not aligned with classification, so sensitive data is broadly accessible
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.
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