K05 assurance architecture
Critical Datacenter Control Catalog
Direct answer
The catalog contains controls whose objectives, evidence, failure conditions, assurance links, and source mappings can be tailored to a named facility. It is a design and evidence architecture, not a compliance certificate.
Governance
GOV-01
Authority and mission register
Maintain signed, versioned authority, asset scope, allowed actions, prohibited outcomes, expiry, revocation, and review routes.
GOV-02
Site-tailoring and applicability record
Record the facility configuration, licensing path, BES status, contractual roles, jurisdictions, assumptions, exclusions, and evidence owner for every selected control.
GOV-03
Hazard and assurance-defeater register
Track hazards and evidence that can invalidate a claim, with owner, severity, disposition, expiry, and residual consequence.
Architecture
ARC-01
Critical-function decomposition
Decompose safety, security, power, cooling, compute, communications, evidence, and restoration into protected functions and dependencies.
ARC-02
Deterministic safety separation
Use physical, one-way, or independently assured boundaries for safety-significant functions and validate every maintenance or support path.
ARC-03
Trust-zone microsegmentation
Enforce deny-by-default communications between workloads, management, OT, cooling, grid, and external services using authenticated identities and declared flows.
Identity
ID-01
Non-human workload identity
Issue short-lived, cryptographically verifiable workload identities and remove shared machine credentials from control paths.
ID-02
Privileged session control
Broker, record, time-limit, and revoke privileged maintenance and emergency access; separate identity approval from technical reachability.
Supply Chain
SUP-01
SBOM and component provenance
Maintain machine-readable software, firmware, model, data, and hardware component inventories linked to exact releases and known defects.
SUP-02
Signed update and rollback
Accept only authorized signed artifacts, test rollback, preserve prior known-good states, and prevent unreviewed downgrade or cross-environment promotion.
Management Plane
MGT-01
BMC isolation and attestation
Place BMCs on a separately controlled management plane, deny ordinary egress, attest firmware, and isolate abnormal management behavior.
MGT-02
Hardware-rooted attestation
Verify boot, firmware, hypervisor, confidential-compute, and security-processor state before granting access to protected data or control functions.
OT/Nuclear
OT-01
Passive OT asset and dependency discovery
Discover OT assets and communication dependencies without unsafe active probing, then reconcile against authorized configuration.
OT-02
Physics-informed detection
Cross-check cyber telemetry against process invariants and independent measurements so statistically plausible but physically unsafe data is rejected.
OT-03
Independent safe-state path
Provide an approved path to safe state that does not depend on the suspect enterprise network, model, identity provider, or timing source.
Power/Cooling
PWR-01
Load-rejection and islanding assurance
Model and test credible load steps, islanding, resynchronization, black-start dependencies, and fail-safe load shedding.
CLG-01
Cooling independent protection
Protect essential cooling with independent sensing, local control, safe fallback, and tested behavior under datacenter-management compromise.
Timing
TIM-01
Assured time and holdover
Use authenticated and diverse time sources, path-delay monitoring, holdover, clock-health evidence, and safe behavior when time confidence is lost.
Autonomy
AUT-01
Bounded autonomous action tiering
Separate observe, recommend, contain, protect, restore, and external-effect tiers; authorize tools and outcomes independently at each tier.
AUT-02
Causal response guard
Require an admissible causal path from observation to proposed action, reject actions with unknown physical effects, and record uncertainty.
AUT-03
Multi-agent trust boundaries
Authenticate agent-to-agent messages, isolate memory and tools, limit propagation depth, and treat peer output as untrusted evidence rather than authority.
AUT-04
Model and data provenance and drift
Version models, prompts, policies, training/evaluation data, retrieval corpora, thresholds, and drift observations; suspend affected actions when provenance fails.
Physical Protection
PHY-01
Multi-sensor disagreement management
Fuse independent modalities, expose confidence and disagreement, degrade suspect sensors, and prevent a single classifier from controlling high-consequence action.
PHY-02
Non-destructive delay and access denial
Use authorized access control, barriers, compartmentation, lockdown, tracking, alerting, and responder integration before considering any force-enabled capability.
PHY-03
Counter-UAS authority separation
Separate UAS detection and airspace restriction from interception, interference, seizure, disabling, or destruction; bind each action to actor-specific authority.
EM-01
Electromagnetic resilience
Protect essential control, communications, timing, sensors, and restoration assets against credible conducted and radiated interference with tested degraded modes.
Recovery
REC-01
Clean-room restoration
Maintain isolated recovery infrastructure, verified images, credential rotation, dependency order, evidence preservation, and post-restore attestation.
REC-02
Critical-function recovery objectives
Define and test function-specific safe-state, recovery-time, recovery-point, evidence, and service-priority objectives rather than a single enterprise metric.
Evidence
EVD-01
Tamper-evident decision receipts
Record observation, evidence inputs, model and software versions, authority, proposed and executed action, outcome, rollback, and reviewer disposition.
EVD-02
Independent verification and replay
Enable an independent party to reproduce the build, configuration, test result, decision logic, package, or recovery outcome within declared limits.
EVD-03
Readiness downgrade on evidence failure
Automatically mark readiness degraded, stale, unavailable, or suspended when required evidence expires, fails, contradicts the claim, or becomes inaccessible.
Operations
OPS-01
Incident command and deconfliction
Maintain clear cyber, physical, nuclear, grid, emergency, intelligence, law-enforcement, vendor, and executive roles with one current incident authority map.