Compliance & Regulations/North America/NIST 800-161
Sovereign / National · United States (Federal); used globally for SCRM

NIST SP 800-161 (Rev 2)

Supply Chain Risk Management practices for federal systems — the foundation for SBOM and software provenance requirements.

Regulator
National Institute of Standards and Technology
Jurisdiction
United States (Federal); used globally for SCRM
Status
Rev 2 (final, May 2022).
In force since
May 2022
Regulator's source
Who it applies to

Federal agencies and their suppliers; widely adopted in private sector SCRM programs.

Audit / certification status

Continuous evidence pipeline available; audit support included for all customers.

What it requires

What NIST 800-161 actually requires.

These are the obligations a regulated entity owes — the things an assessor or supervisor will ask about.

01

Organisation-level SCRM strategy with named roles and escalation paths.

02

Supplier inventory and tiering by criticality and access.

03

Supplier security agreements (SLAs, attestation cadence, right-to-audit).

04

Software Bill of Materials (SBOM) for each acquired component (aligned with EO 14028 §4(e)).

05

Component integrity verification — signed artifacts, provenance, vulnerability monitoring.

06

Foreign Ownership, Control or Influence (FOCI) screening for suppliers in sensitive contexts.

How Safeguard maps to it

Pre-mapped controls. Continuous evidence.

Each requirement above is bound to live telemetry — not screenshots. The mapping below is what your auditor or regulator sees.

Automatic SBOM generation per build, signed (Sigstore) and stored with full provenance.

Continuous monitoring of every component for new CVEs, KEV inclusion, and EOL events.

Supplier risk scoring with tier classification (T1–T4) and renewal cadence.

FOCI-screening hooks: components flagged when transitive dependencies touch high-risk jurisdictions.

Component integrity attestations (in-toto, SLSA L3) verifiable without trusting Safeguard.

Evidence we produce

Artifacts your auditor accepts.

Each evidence artifact is signed and timestamped. Auditors can verify integrity without trusting Safeguard.

Signed SBOMs in CycloneDX or SPDX with VEX (Vulnerability Exploitability eXchange) annotations.

Supplier inventory with tiering and risk score per supplier.

Component provenance graph from source to deployed artifact.

EOL / supplier-discontinuation alerts with replacement recommendations.

Ready for NIST 800-161?

Bring the framework. We'll walk the controls with you — section by section, evidence packet by evidence packet, with the regulators you actually have to answer to.

Safeguard | Software Supply Chain Security Platform | Zero CVE + Self-Healing