CIS Benchmarks

Available in Fleet Premium.

CIS Benchmarks represent the consensus-based effort of cybersecurity experts to help you protect your systems against threats more confidently. For more information about CIS Benchmarks check out Center for Internet Security's website.

Fleet has implemented native support for CIS Benchmarks for the following platforms:

• macOS 13.0 Ventura
• macOS 14.0 Sonoma
• macOS 15.0 Sequoia
• Windows 10 Enterprise
• Windows 11 Enterprise

Where possible, each CIS Benchmark is implemented with a policy query in Fleet.

These policy queries are intended to assess your organization's security posture against the CIS benchmarks. Because the policy queries alone do not remediate security issues, a host may fail a CIS Benchmark policy if there is no device profile or script in place to enforce the setting. By enabling automations in Fleet, these policy queries can used as the basis for managing security compliance and remediation in Fleet.

For example, this is the query for CIS - Ensure FileVault Is Enabled (MDM Required):

SELECT 1 WHERE 
      EXISTS (
        SELECT 1 FROM managed_policies WHERE 
            domain='com.apple.MCX' AND 
            name='dontAllowFDEDisable' AND 
            (value = 1 OR value = 'true') AND 
            username = ''
        )
      AND NOT EXISTS (
        SELECT 1 FROM managed_policies WHERE 
            domain='com.apple.MCX' AND 
            name='dontAllowFDEDisable' AND 
            (value != 1 AND value != 'true')
        )
      AND EXISTS (
        SELECT 1 FROM disk_encryption WHERE 
            user_uuid IS NOT "" AND 
            filevault_status = 'on' 
        );  

This policy is evaluating 2 attributes:

1. Is FileVault currently enabled?
2. Is there a profile in place that prevents FileVault from being disabled?

If either of these conditions fails, the host is considered to be failing the policy.

How to add CIS Benchmarks

All CIS policies are stored under our restricted licensed folder ee/cis/. To easily convert the CIS benchmarks YAML raw file to a YAML array format compatible with Fleet GitOps, follow these steps:

1. Install yq if you don't have it already. (yq is a command-line YAML, JSON and XML processor.)
2. Run this Shell script to transform the policies into Fleet YAML:

#!/bin/bash
#shellcheck disable=SC2207


# convert.cis.policy.queries.yml @2024 Fleet Device Management


# CIS queries as written here:
#    https://github.com/fleetdm/fleet/blob/main/ee/cis/macos-14/cis-policy-queries.yml
# must be converted to be uploaded via Fleet GitOps.
#
# This script takes as input the YAML from the file linked above & creates a new YAML array compatible with the "Separate file" format documented here:
#    https://fleetdm.com/docs/configuration/yaml-files#separate-file


# get CIS queries raw file from Fleet repo
cisfile='https://raw.githubusercontent.com/fleetdm/fleet/refs/heads/main/ee/cis/macos-14/cis-policy-queries.yml'
cispath='/private/tmp/cis.yml'
# cisspfl='/private/tmp/cis.gitops.yml'

/usr/bin/curl -X GET -LSs "$cisfile" -o "$cispath"


# create CIS benchmark array
IFS=$'\n'
cisarry=($(/opt/homebrew/bin/yq '.spec.name' "$cispath" | /usr/bin/grep -v '\-\-\-'))

for i in "${cisarry[@]}"
do
    cisname="$(/opt/homebrew/bin/yq ".[] | select(.name == \"$i\") | (del(.platforms)) | (del(.purpose)) | (del(.tags)) | (del(.contributors))" "$cispath" | /opt/homebrew/bin/yq eval '.name')"
    cispfrm="$(/opt/homebrew/bin/yq ".[] | select(.name == \"$i\") | (del(.platforms)) | (del(.purpose)) | (del(.tags)) | (del(.contributors))" "$cispath" | /opt/homebrew/bin/yq eval '.platform')"
    cisdscr="$(/opt/homebrew/bin/yq ".[] | select(.name == \"$i\") | (del(.platforms)) | (del(.purpose)) | (del(.tags)) | (del(.contributors))" "$cispath" | /opt/homebrew/bin/yq eval --unwrapScalar=true '.description')"
    cisrslt="$(/opt/homebrew/bin/yq ".[] | select(.name == \"$i\") | (del(.platforms)) | (del(.purpose)) | (del(.tags)) | (del(.contributors))" "$cispath" | /opt/homebrew/bin/yq eval --unwrapScalar=true '.resolution')"
    cisqrry="$(/opt/homebrew/bin/yq ".[] | select(.name == \"$i\") | (del(.platforms)) | (del(.purpose)) | (del(.tags)) | (del(.contributors))" "$cispath" | /opt/homebrew/bin/yq eval --unwrapScalar=true '.query')" 

    printf "name: %s\nplatform: %s\ndescription: |\n%s\nresolution: |\n%s\nquery: |\n%s\n" "$cisname" "$cispfrm" "$cisdscr" "$cisrslt" "$cisqrry" | /usr/bin/sed 's/^/    /g;s/^[[:space:]]*name:/- name:/;s/^[[:space:]]*platform:/  platform:/;s/^[[:space:]]*description:/  description:/;s/^[[:space:]]*resolution:/  resolution:/;s/^[[:space:]]*query:/  query:/'

# set -x
# trap read debug

done

3. The converted YAML is written to standard out in the Terminal. Copy/paste the CIS policies you wish to use into your own YAML file and run Fleet GitOps.

If you're using fleetctl apply, you can apply the policies to a specific team use the --policies-team flag:

fleetctl apply --policies-team "Workstations" -f cis-policy-queries.yml

Levels 1 and 2

CIS designates various benchmarks as Level 1 or Level 2 to describe the level of thoroughness and burden that each benchmark represents.

Each benchmark is tagged as CIS_Level1 or CIS_Level2.

Level 1

Items in this profile intend to:

• be practical and prudent;
• provide a clear security benefit; and
• not inhibit the utility of the technology beyond acceptable means.

Level 2

This profile extends the "Level 1" profile. Items in this profile exhibit one or more of the following characteristics:

• are intended for environments or use cases where security is paramount or acts as defense in depth measure
• may negatively inhibit the utility or performance of the technology.

Requirements

Following are the requirements to use the CIS Benchmarks in Fleet:

• Devices must be running fleetd, Fleet's lightweight agent.
• Some CIS Benchmarks explicitly involve verifying MDM-based controls, so devices must be enrolled to an MDM solution.
• On macOS, the orbit component of fleetd must have "Full Disk Access", see Grant Full Disk Access to Osquery on macOS.

Limitations

Certain benchmarks cannot be automated by a policy in Fleet. For a list of specific benchmarks which are not covered, please visit the README for each benchmark:

• macOS 13.0 Ventura
• macOS 14.0 Sonoma
• macos 15.0 Sequoia
• Windows 10 Enterprise
• Windows 11 Enterprise

Performance testing

In August 2023, we completed scale testing on 10k Windows hosts and 70k macOS hosts. Ultimately, we validated both server and host performance at that scale.

Detailed results are here.