SIMP — Systems Integrity Management Platform

SIMP is a framework that aims to provide a reasonable combination of security compliance and operational flexibility.  The ultimate goal of the project is to provide a complete management environment focused on compliance with the various profiles in the SCAP Security Guide Project and industry best practice. Though it is fully capable out of the box, the intent of SIMP is to be molded to your target environment in such a way that deviations are easily identifiable to both Operations Teams and Security Officers.

SIMP helps to keep networked systems compliant with security standards, the NSA said, and should form part of a layered, “defence-in-depth” approach to information security. NSA said it released the tool to avoid duplication after US government departments and other groups tried to replicate the product in order to meet compliance requirements set by US Defence and intelligence bodies.

The NSA, which has in recent years faced heat over its mass surveillance and bulk data collection activities as exposed by former contractor Edward Snowden, has increased its efforts to share its technology in recent months.

The program allows the NSA to offer internally-developed technology to industry and researchers. It has so far opened up a range of products in eight categories spanning networking, optics, processing, security, and microelectronics, among others

Director of the program, Linda Burger, said the open source method of “transferring technology from the federal laboratory to the marketplace is extremely efficient”.

Despite the secrecy of its intelligence gathering work, the NSA has a history of producing and publishing security-related work, and holds annual competitions that seek to find the best cybersecurity papers.