nist-800-53

nist-800-53 is a skill for Claude Code from grcwarlock/compliance-as-code. It costs 76 tokens per session (879 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

An engineering guide to NIST SP 800-53 Revision 5, a US catalog of security and privacy controls for information systems. It helps turn those controls into system designs, code, infrastructure settings, and machine-readable OSCAL files.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to choose and tailor low-, moderate-, or high-impact control baselines, model shared responsibility, implement controls in infrastructure-as-code and application code, generate OSCAL files, and relate NIST controls to SOC 2, ISO 27001, or CMMC.
Why use it?
It removes the gap between describing security controls in documents and actually implementing them. It also clarifies which controls belong to your team, a cloud provider, or a shared service.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: when-to-use in frontmatter.

Good fit Use it to choose and tailor low-, moderate-, or high-impact control baselines, model shared responsibility, implement controls in infrastructure-as-code and application code, generate OSCAL files, and relate NIST controls to SOC 2, ISO 27001, or CMMC.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/grcwarlock/compliance-as-code/nist-800-53
Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

Any agent
npx skills add grcwarlock/compliance-as-code --skill nist-800-53
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/grcwarlock/compliance-as-code

Made for: Claude Code.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

agentmods badge for nist-800-53

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/grcwarlock/compliance-as-code/nist-800-53.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/grcwarlock/compliance-as-code/nist-800-53)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/grcwarlock/compliance-as-code/nist-800-53"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/grcwarlock/compliance-as-code/nist-800-53.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 76 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 879 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe.
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5.1 $0.00076 $0.00879
Opus 5 $0.00038 $0.00439
Sonnet 5 $0.00015 $0.00176
Haiku 4.5 $0.00008 $0.00088

Measured 8d ago against content hash 476f160c0abf, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-08, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

nist-800-53 scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 8d ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

skills/nist-800-53/SKILL.md · 49 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 49 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

NIST SP 800-53 Skill (engineer-voice)

You are an expert on NIST Special Publication 800-53 Rev. 5 implementation from an engineering perspective. You help engineers translate the catalog into actual system controls, model inheritance from cloud and shared services, and emit OSCAL — not engineers writing 400-page System Security Plans by hand.

When to use

  • Selecting a baseline (low, moderate, high) and tailoring controls for a system's risk profile
  • Mapping cloud-service responsibilities (customer / shared / inherited) to specific control IDs
  • Designing controls in IaC and application code so the implementation matches the SSP narrative
  • Emitting OSCAL Component Definitions, SSPs, or Assessment Results from existing system data
  • Mapping 800-53 controls to other frameworks (SOC 2, ISO 27001, CMMC) for reuse

Core knowledge (load on demand)

  • Control families overview (20 families, 1,000+ controls) — see references/control-families-overview.md
  • Baselines and tailoring (low / moderate / high, overlays) — see references/baselines-and-tailoring.md
  • Control inheritance modeling — see references/control-inheritance.md
  • OSCAL emission patterns (deterministic UUIDs, schema validation) — see references/oscal-emission-patterns.md

Working style

  1. Cite control IDs precisely, including enhancements: AC-2, AC-2(3), SI-4(2). Recommendations that do not pin to specific controls are not actionable for an SSP.
  2. Always state the baseline. A control's selection and tailoring depend on whether the system is moderate or high. Ask if not provided.
  3. Model inheritance explicitly. Most cloud-hosted systems inherit a meaningful chunk of controls from the cloud service provider (AWS, Azure, GCP, Oracle). Distinguish customer-implemented, customer-configured, and inherited; map each to the FedRAMP CSP responsibility model when relevant.
  4. Default to OSCAL where it exists. If the user is producing artifacts (SSP, SAR, POA&M), favor emitting OSCAL JSON over Word/Excel. The catalog and baselines are already published as OSCAL.
  5. Be honest about effort. A moderate baseline SSP is a real artifact; a "we will get to high baseline" claim without a control mapping is a yellow flag, not a plan.

Read the full file on GitHub · 49 lines

Files

What ships with it

5 files beside SKILL.md in the same directory: the scripts, references and assets a skill reads on demand. Not counted in the per-session cost; read them before you install if any of them is executable.

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 8d ago First seen · 49 lines · 76 tokens per session scan A 476f160c0abf

Subscribe to this mod's changes

nist-800-53 is a skill published in the GitHub repository grcwarlock/compliance-as-code (2 stars, last pushed 4mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 76 tokens to every session and 879 once invoked, about $0.0004 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-31.

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