Executive Order

Subscribe to Executive Order

This is the twenty-first in a series of Covington blogs on implementation of Executive Order 14028, “Improving the Nation’s Cybersecurity,” issued by President Biden on May 12, 2021 (the “Cyber EO”).  The first blog summarized the Cyber EO’s key provisions and timelines, and the subsequent blogs described the actions taken by various Government agencies to implement the Cyber EO from June 2021 through December 2022.  This blog describes key actions taken to implement the Cyber EO during January 2023.

GSA Announces That It Will Require Software Vendors to Submit Letters of Attestation Beginning in June 2023.

            On January 11, 2023, the General Services Administration (“GSA”) Senior Procurement Executive and Chief Information Officer jointly issued Acquisition letter MV-23-02, “Ensuring Only Approved Software Is Acquired and Used at GSA” (the “GSA letter”).  The GSA letter establishes a June 12, 2023 effective date for implementing the secure software acquisition requirements of Office of Management and Budget (“OMB”) Memorandum M-22-18, issued pursuant to Section 4 of the Cyber EO.  That OMB memorandum directs that agencies must only use software that complies with Government-specified secure software development practices.  These practices include obtaining self-attestations of conformity with secure software development practices and in certain cases as determined by agencies, artifacts such as Software Bills of Materials (SBOMs) from software vendors to verify that the acquired software[1] was developed and produced according to NIST security guidelines and best practices.

            The GSA letter directs GSA’s IT officials to update GSA’s policies by June 12, 2023 to reflect the process for collecting, renewing, retaining, and monitoring the self-attestation information mandated by OMB M-22-18.  For existing contracts that include the use of software, the GSA letter directs GSA IT to provide an internally accessible list of the software used for each contract and to collect vendor attestations by June 12, 2023.  For new contracts that include the use of software, the GSA letter directs the relevant acquisition teams to modify the acquisition planning process to ensure that performance of such contracts begins only after the requisite attestations have been collected and considered.  Finally, with respect to GSA-administered Government-wide indefinite delivery vehicles (e.g., Federal Supply Schedule contracts, Government-Wide Acquisition Contracts, and Multi-Agency Contracts), the GSA letter directs GSA contracting activities to allow, but not require, contractors to provide attestations at the base contract level rather than the task or delivery order level, and to make those attestations available to ordering activities to the extent possible.  With this said, the GSA letter specifies that ordering agencies will ultimately be responsible for complying with OMB M-22-18.…

Continue Reading January 2023 Developments Under President Biden’s Cybersecurity Executive Order

This is the nineteenth in a series of Covington blogs on implementation of Executive Order 14028, “Improving the Nation’s Cybersecurity,” issued by President Biden on May 12, 2021 (the “Cyber EO”).  The first blog summarized the Cyber EO’s key provisions and timelines, and the subsequent blogs described the actions taken by various Government agencies to implement the Cyber EO from June 2021 through October 2022.  This blog describes key actions taken to implement the Cyber EO during November 2022.

I. CISA, NSA, and ODNI Release Software Supply Chain Security Guide for Customers 

On November 17, 2022, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), the National Security Agency (NSA), and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) released the third in a series of recommended practice guides for securing the software supply chain (the “Customer Guide”).  The first practice guide in this series – published in September 2022 – was for software developers, and the second – published in October 2022 – was for software suppliers.  Each of the three guides is intended to supplement the Secure Software Development Framework (SSDF) published by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) pursuant to Section 4 of the Cyber EO.

The Customer Guide identifies key supply chain security objectives for software customers (acquirers) and recommends several broad categories of practices to achieve those objectives including security requirements planning, secure software architecture, and maintaining the security of software and the underlying infrastructure (e.g., environment, source code review, test).  For each of these practice categories, the guide identifies examples of scenarios that could be exploited (threat scenarios) and examples of controls that could be implemented to mitigate those threat scenarios. …

Continue Reading November 2022 Developments Under President Biden’s Cybersecurity Executive Order