MA-3 — Maintenance Tools
Approving, controlling, monitoring, and reviewing maintenance tools address security-related issues associated with maintenance tools that are not within system authorization boundaries and are used specifically for diagnostic and repair actions on organizational systems. Organizations have flexibility in determining roles for the approval of maintenance tools and how that approval is documented. A periodic review of maintenance tools facilitates the withdrawal of approval for outdated, unsupported, irrelevant, or no-longer-used tools. Maintenance tools can include hardware, software, and firmware items and may be pre-installed, brought in with maintenance personnel on media, cloud-based, or downloaded from a website. Such tools can be vehicles for transporting malicious code, either intentionally or unintentionally, into a facility and subsequently into systems. Maintenance tools can in
Read the official statement, discussion, parameters, enhancements, and assessment methods →
NIST CSF 2.0 informative references
These CSF Subcategories list this base control or one of its enhancements in the imported NIST informative reference.
NIST SP 800-171 and SP 800-172
SP 800-171 requirements sourcing this control
SP 800-172 enhanced requirements sourcing this control
MITRE D3FEND techniques
MITRE ATT&CK relationships
Curated mitigation mappings
Inferred behavior relationships
Experimental: These relationships are inferred through D3FEND and must be validated against architecture, telemetry, and threat context.
Show 31 additional relationships
Use the map without overclaiming.
A CSF informative reference is not an equivalence statement. A source-control relationship is not proof of implementation. A D3FEND semantic relationship is not a product claim. An inferred ATT&CK link is a hypothesis for engineering analysis.
Bare Metal Cyber is an independent educational publisher and is not affiliated with or endorsed by NIST or MITRE. Informative references and cross-framework relationships support navigation and analysis; they do not establish compliance, applicability, equivalence, control inheritance, or guaranteed mitigation effectiveness.