Introduction to CSE

Compliance Signal Enumeration (CSE) is a public specification and registry that defines stable identifiers for recurring technical signals observed in software, infrastructure, and operational artifacts that are relevant to compliance and risk assessments.

Why CSE Exists

The State of Compliance Today

Modern organizations operate in an environment of overlapping compliance requirements. A typical enterprise may need to demonstrate adherence to HIPAA, SOC 2, ISO 27001, and PCI DSS simultaneously—each framework with its own terminology, control structures, and audit expectations. The technical controls that satisfy these frameworks are often identical, yet they must be documented, evidenced, and reported separately.

The tooling landscape compounds this complexity. Organizations deploy an average of 45+ security tools, each producing findings in proprietary formats with vendor-specific identifiers. When a cloud security scanner detects an unencrypted S3 bucket, it generates output that cannot be directly correlated with findings from an infrastructure-as-code scanner that detected the same misconfiguration in Terraform, or with a compliance platform tracking HIPAA violations.

The Cost of Fragmentation

This fragmentation has measurable costs:

• Manual correlation effort: Security teams spend significant time mapping findings between tools, often maintaining custom spreadsheets or scripts to translate between proprietary formats
• Inconsistent audit evidence: The same technical condition appears differently across reports, creating confusion during audits and requiring manual reconciliation
• Delayed remediation: Without unified tracking, the same issue may be reported multiple times by different tools, obscuring the true scope and priority of vulnerabilities
• Integration overhead: Every new tool requires custom integration logic to normalize its output, creating maintenance burden and technical debt
• Framework mapping duplication: Each organization independently maps tool outputs to compliance controls, duplicating effort across the industry

The Interoperability Gap

The compliance and security industry lacks what other technical domains take for granted: a shared language for describing observations.

Software development has standardized on CVE for vulnerabilities, CWE for weakness types, and MITRE ATT&CK for adversary techniques. These enumerations enable tools, teams, and organizations to communicate unambiguously. A CVE identifier means the same thing whether it appears in a GitHub advisory, a penetration test report, or a vendor security bulletin.

Compliance has no equivalent.

When a scanner reports a finding, it uses its own vocabulary. When that finding is imported into a GRC platform, it must be translated. When an auditor reviews the evidence, they must map it to framework controls. Each step introduces potential for error, delay, and inconsistency.

Tool A: "SSH_OPEN_TO_INTERNET"
Tool B: "public-ssh-access-detected"
Tool C: "Finding: SSH port 22 exposed to 0.0.0.0/0"
Auditor: "Which control does this violate?"

These all describe the same technical condition. Without a shared identifier, correlation requires manual effort at every boundary between systems and stakeholders.

The CSE Approach

CSE addresses this gap by providing what the compliance ecosystem has been missing: standardized infrastructure for compliance data exchange.

CSE-CMMC-COMMS-UNRESTRICTED-SSH-001

A single, stable identifier that any tool can emit and any consumer can understand, regardless of vendor, framework, or implementation.

But CSE is more than a catalog of identifiers. It provides:

Part of a Larger Vision

CSE represents foundational infrastructure for a compliance ecosystem that does not yet fully exist—but is increasingly necessary.

As organizations adopt infrastructure-as-code, shift security left, and automate compliance monitoring, the need for machine-readable, vendor-neutral compliance data becomes critical. Manual processes that worked for annual audits cannot scale to continuous compliance. Point-to-point integrations between tools create exponential complexity as the tooling landscape grows.

CSE enables a different architecture:

• Tool vendors emit standardized signals rather than proprietary identifiers, reducing integration friction and increasing the value of their output across customer environments
• Compliance platforms consume findings in a common format, enabling true multi-tool aggregation without custom parsers for each data source
• GRC systems leverage pre-built mappings to automatically correlate findings to framework controls across HIPAA, SOC 2, ISO 27001, PCI DSS, and other frameworks
• Auditors receive evidence with consistent, unambiguous references that map directly to control requirements
• Organizations maintain a single source of truth for compliance observations, regardless of which tools detected them

What CSE Is (and Is Not)

Supported Frameworks

CSE covers signals across 12 major compliance frameworks with complete control mappings:

Next Steps

Now that you understand what CSE is and why it exists, you can: