What evidence do auditors commonly ask for on PR.AA-04 Identity assertions are protected, conveyed, and verified?

Token and assertion configuration standards; Federation trust relationships inventory; Token signing key management procedures; Assertion validation telemetry; Federation incident response plan.

What is the most common gap auditors find on PR.AA-04?

Token lifetimes too long for sensitive apps

NIST CSF 2.0 · PR - Protect

`PR.AA-04` Identity assertions are protected, conveyed, and verified

Identity assertions are protected, conveyed, and verified. Control from NIST Cybersecurity Framework 2.0 framework, domain: PR - Protect.

Source: NIST CSF 2.0, PR.AA-04. 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 NIST CSF 2.0 in the compliance library.

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

Assertion validation telemetry · Document repository

periodic reviewEvidence produced at each review

none for this control

governing documentDocuments that govern the control

Token and assertion configuration standards · Policy repository / GRC workspace
Federation trust relationships inventory · Policy repository / GRC workspace
Token signing key management procedures · Policy repository / GRC workspace
Federation incident response plan · Policy repository / GRC workspace

First move

Mostly documents and reviews. Pull the 1 system-held artefact from your Document repository 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

Token lifetimes too long for sensitive apps
Federation trust list not reviewed
Signing keys rotated only on incident
Assertion validation telemetry not monitored

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

PR.AA-03 Users, services, and hardware are authenticated · PR.AA-05 Access permissions, entitlements, and authorizations are defined in a policy, managed, enforced, and…