Sultan Almuhammadi and Majeed Alsaleh, King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals, Saudi Arabia

The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has issued a framework to provide guidance for organizations within critical infrastructure sectors to reduce the risk associated with cyber security. The framework is called NIST Cyber Security Framework for Critical Infrastructure (CSF). Many organizations are currently implementing or aligned to different information security frameworks. The implementation of NIST CSF needs to be aligned with and complement the existing frameworks. NIST states that the NIST CSF is not a maturity framework. Therefore, there is a need to adopt an existing maturity model or create one to have a common way to measure the CSF implementation progress. This paper explores the applicability of number of maturity models to be used as a measure to the security poster of organizations implementing the NIST CSF. This paper reviews the NIST CSF and compares it to other information security related frameworks such as COBIT, ISO/IEC 27001 and the ISF Standard of Good Practice (SoGP) for Information Security. We propose a new information security maturity model (ISMM) that fills the gap in the NIST CSF.

Information Security, Maturity Model, Cyber-Security.