Compliance Manager evaluates the risk associated with cryptographic assets by measuring the likelihood of compromise and the potential impact of a compromise. The risk model helps you distinguish between assets that have security weaknesses and assets that are important to your organization.

Prior to Release 10.6.1, Compliance Manager assigned a single risk score to each cryptographic asset. The score relied heavily on manually documented attributes and provided limited visibility into the factors contributing to risk. In Compliance Manager 10.6.1, the Risk feature introduces a two-dimensional risk model based on separate Compromise and Impact axes, providing greater visibility into cryptographic risk and helping you prioritize remediation activities.

Compliance Manager assesses each asset on two independent axes:

• Compromise: How likely is the asset to be compromised?
• Impact: How much damage could result if the asset were compromised?

Keeping these measurements separate provides additional context for prioritizing risk. For example, a poorly protected certificate on which nothing depends might require attention, but it might not be as urgent as an exposed certificate authority on which many production systems depend.

Compromise

The Compromise score indicates how likely an asset is to be compromised.

The factors used to calculate Compromise depend on the asset type. Examples include:

• Whether the asset complies with applicable policies.
• Whether the asset is managed through a lifecycle process.
• Whether a private key is protected by a hardware security module.
• Whether the asset uses a quantum-unsafe algorithm.
• Whether a certificate is approaching expiration.
• Whether a private key is reused across certificates.
• Whether the asset is associated with a weakly protected certificate authority.
• Whether an owner is assigned to the asset.

A serious issue can make a significant contribution to the Compromise score. Passing other checks does not dilute the effect of a severe issue.

Impact

The Impact score indicates the potential damage that could result if an asset were compromised.

Impact factors can include:

• The number of systems that depend on the asset.
• The criticality of the asset.
• The confidentiality of the asset.
• Whether the asset is active or dormant.
• How the asset is used, such as for TLS, signing, or code signing.
• The criticality of assets beneath it in a certificate or key hierarchy.

Dependencies are the largest contributor to the Impact score. An asset on which many other assets depend can receive a high Impact score even when it is currently well protected.

Risk scores and bands

Compliance Manager calculates a score from 0 to 100 for each axis. It then assigns each score to one of the following bands:

The combination of the Compromise and Impact bands determines where the asset appears in the Risk Landscape and its overall risk level.

Overall risk levels

For information on the overall risk levels, see: Overall Risk Levels.

Relationship-Based Assessment

Compliance Manager can infer risk information from relationships between cryptographic assets.

Criticality, confidentiality, and dependency information can propagate through relationships between certificates, keys, and other cryptographic assets. This allows Compliance Manager to calculate meaningful risk scores without requiring manual documentation for every asset.

This relationship-based assessment helps Compliance Manager calculate meaningful risk scores without requiring manual documentation for every asset.