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ISO 42001, NIST SP 800-53 Rev. 5, & FIPS 140-3

Overview: Enterprise Governance & Cryptographic Integrity​

Federal and high-assurance enterprise deployments require adherence to the most stringent AI risk management and cryptographic integrity standards available, including ISO/IEC 42001 (AI Management Systems), NIST SP 800-53 Rev. 5 (Security and Privacy Controls), and FIPS 140-3 (Cryptographic Module Security).

The LLM-Shield-Proxy acts as the central governance dispatcher and cryptographic boundary for these deployments.

ISO/IEC 42001 & NIST SP 800-53 Rev. 5​

Both ISO 42001 and NIST SP 800-53 Rev. 5 emphasize continuous risk management, systemic oversight, and the automated generation of compliance artifacts.

Universal Decision Trace Exporter & OSCAL​

Manually mapping LLM events to compliance controls is impossible at scale. The proxy bridges the gap between low-level system events and high-level GRC standards.

  • Automated Mapping: The proxy's GRC Dispatcher captures low-level interception and redaction events and maps these AI system decisions to automated NIST OSCAL (Open Security Controls Assessment Language) compliance artifacts.
  • GRC Integration: These OSCAL artifacts, alongside OpenTelemetry gen_ai.* spans, are continuously dispatched to external GRC and observability tools (e.g., Vanta, Drata, Datadog). This provides auditors with a real-time, provable dashboard of the system's risk posture.

WORM Logging & Traceability​

As required by NIST Audit and Accountability (AU) controls:

  • Merkle Hash Chaining: All security events utilize SHA-256 sequential Merkle hash chaining, guaranteeing WORM (Write Once, Read Many) integrity and non-repudiation of the audit trail.
  • RFC 6902 Differential Logs: Logs strictly record the categories of data manipulated (JSON patch differential logs) ensuring that the logging infrastructure itself does not become a toxic data asset.

FIPS 140-3 Integrity Controls​

For deployments within the US Department of Defense, federal agencies, or highly regulated financial sectors, cryptographic modules must adhere to FIPS 140-3 standards.

Cryptographic Known Answer Tests (KAT)​

To guarantee that the proxy's internal cryptographic algorithms are functioning correctly and have not been degraded or altered:

  • Algorithm Self-Tests: The system enforces rigorous cryptographic Known Answer Tests (KAT) at boot time for both the SHA-256 hashing engine and the AES-256-GCM envelope encryption engine.
  • Execution: During initialization, the proxy feeds predetermined inputs into the cryptographic modules and verifies that the outputs mathematically match the strict expected ciphertexts and digests.
  • Failure Halting: If a KAT fails (indicating hardware degradation, memory corruption, or binary tampering), the proxy will aggressively halt initialization and refuse to route traffic, preventing any unencrypted or improperly hashed data from traversing the network.

(Reference the Architecture & Cryptographic Data Flow for deeper implementation details).