SI-2: Flaw Remediation

To meet the si-2: flaw remediation requirement, you must run a repeatable process to identify, report, and correct system flaws across your in-scope systems, and keep evidence that it works in practice. Operationalize SI-2 by assigning ownership, defining intake-to-fix workflows, setting remediation expectations, and retaining audit-ready artifacts for detection, triage, patching, and verification. ¹

Key takeaways:

• SI-2 requires an end-to-end flaw lifecycle: find flaws, log them, fix them, and prove closure with evidence. ²
• Auditors look for governance (owners, procedures) plus execution (tickets, patch records, exceptions) across all in-scope assets.
• The fastest path is a single remediation workflow tied to asset inventory, vulnerability scanning, change management, and exception handling.

SI-2 sits in the “System and Information Integrity” family and is the control examiners use to test whether your organization can respond to known weaknesses in a disciplined, provable way. The text is short, but the operational footprint is large: scanners, patching, emergency changes, third-party advisories, endpoint management, server maintenance windows, and cloud image pipelines all end up inside the same requirement boundary.

For a Compliance Officer, CCO, or GRC lead, the win condition is straightforward: you can demonstrate that flaws are consistently identified, recorded, prioritized, remediated, and validated, with documented exceptions when remediation is not immediate. SI-2 is rarely “missing tooling.” The usual gap is lack of an auditable thread connecting detection to closure, especially across mixed environments (SaaS, IaaS/PaaS, on-prem, containers) and third parties that run parts of your stack.

This page gives requirement-level implementation guidance you can put into production quickly: who owns what, what workflow to implement, what evidence to retain, and what auditors tend to challenge. ¹

Regulatory text

Requirement excerpt: “Identify, report, and correct system flaws;” ²

Operator meaning (what you must do):

• Identify flaws: You need defined sources and methods that find weaknesses (e.g., vulnerability scanning, vendor advisories, internal testing, bug bounty intake, incident learnings), and you must show they operate on in-scope systems.
• Report flaws: “Report” means you record the flaw in a durable system of record (ticket/defect/vuln platform), route it to an owner, and track status through closure.
• Correct flaws: You remediate (patch, configuration change, compensating control, code fix, upgrade, remove affected component), then verify the fix and document closure or a time-bound exception.

That’s SI-2 in practice: a closed-loop remediation program with traceability from discovery to verification. ¹

Plain-English interpretation (what SI-2 expects you to prove)

Auditors will expect you to prove three things:

1. Coverage: in-scope assets are subject to flaw detection and remediation, including endpoints, servers, network devices, cloud resources, and key applications.
2. Consistency: remediation happens through a standard workflow, not ad hoc heroics.
3. Governance: exceptions are approved, documented, and revisited rather than silently accepted risk.

A strong SI-2 implementation looks like: “We can pick any critical system, show last scan results, show the ticket created for a finding, show the patch/change that fixed it, and show verification that it’s resolved.” ¹

Who it applies to (entity + operational context)

SI-2 applies anywhere you adopt NIST SP 800-53 controls, including:

• Federal information systems and the teams that operate them (security, IT operations, platform engineering, application owners). ¹
• Contractor systems handling federal data, including cloud-hosted environments and managed services where the contractor is responsible for system security. ²

Operationally, SI-2 touches:

• IT Ops / Infrastructure: OS and firmware patching, config hardening, network device updates.
• Security Operations / Vulnerability Management: scanning, triage, prioritization, verification.
• Engineering / AppSec: library upgrades, code fixes, container base image rebuilds.
• Change Management: standard and emergency change paths, maintenance windows, rollback plans.
• Third parties: managed hosting, MSPs, and software providers that deliver patches or operate components on your behalf.

What you actually need to do (step-by-step)

1) Define scope and ownership

• Identify the system boundary and in-scope asset classes (endpoints, servers, cloud accounts, container registries, network devices, applications).
• Assign a control owner (GRC/security) and operational owners (vulnerability management lead, endpoint lead, cloud platform lead, app owners).
• Publish a short SI-2 operating procedure that points to the actual workflows and tools people use.

Practical tip: one page that links to the ticket queue(s), scan cadence, prioritization rules, exception process, and reporting dashboard beats a long policy nobody follows.

2) Establish flaw intake channels (identify + report)

Minimum intake sources to formalize:

• Authenticated vulnerability scans (infrastructure and cloud where applicable)
• Endpoint patch status reporting
• Vendor/security advisories for key products
• Application dependency scanning (if applicable to your environment)
• Incident/post-incident corrective actions that create remediation items

For each intake source, define:

• How findings become tickets (automation preferred)
• Required ticket fields: asset, weakness description, severity, owner, due date/target, evidence links

3) Prioritize and assign remediation work

Build a triage rule set that is explainable to auditors:

• Route to the correct resolver group based on asset ownership.
• Set remediation targets by severity and exposure (internet-facing vs internal, privilege required, exploitability signals if your program tracks them).
• Require documented rationale when a finding is downgraded or deferred.

If you use Daydream for control operations, map SI-2 to the control owner, the implemented procedure, and the recurring evidence artifacts so the same workflow produces audit-ready output every cycle. ²

4) Remediate through controlled change

Remediation should flow through:

• Standard change for routine patching
• Emergency change for urgent fixes (same evidence, faster approvals)
• Configuration management for baseline changes
• SDLC release for application fixes

Require the ticket to include:

• What changed (patch ID/version/config diff)
• Where it changed (asset identifiers, environment)
• When it changed (implementation window)
• Who approved it (change record, CAB, or emergency approver)

5) Verify remediation and close the loop

Closure requires verification, not intent:

• Re-scan, re-test, or otherwise validate the fix.
• Mark the ticket “resolved” only after verification.
• For recurring issues (patch fails, configuration drift), open a problem record and track root cause.

6) Run an exception process (when you cannot fix immediately)

Auditors expect exceptions to be controlled:

• Document business/technical reason (e.g., vendor patch unavailable, operational constraints).
• Assign compensating controls (e.g., segmentation, WAF rule, temporary disablement of vulnerable feature).
• Require approval by an accountable risk owner.
• Set a review date and revalidate compensating controls.

Required evidence and artifacts to retain

Use an evidence checklist so teams know what “good” looks like.

Evidence type	What it proves	Examples to retain
SI-2 procedure + ownership	Governance exists	RACI, SOP, on-call/queue ownership
Asset/system inventory reference	Coverage	Asset list export, CMDB snapshot, cloud account inventory
Vulnerability discovery outputs	Identification	Scan reports, advisory intake logs, dependency findings
Ticket records (end-to-end)	Reporting + tracking	Tickets with required fields, assignment, timestamps, status history
Change/patch records	Correction	Change requests, patch deployment logs, configuration diffs
Verification evidence	Closure	Re-scan results, validation screenshots/log extracts, test results
Exception approvals	Controlled risk	Risk acceptance, compensating control plan, expiry/review notes
Metrics and reporting	Ongoing operation	Dashboards, aging reports, SLA breach follow-ups (targets can be internal)

Core audit pattern: pick a sample of findings and walk them from discovery to closure with evidence at each step.

Common exam/audit questions and hangups

Expect questions like:

• “Show me how a flaw found last month was tracked and fixed. Where is the evidence of verification?”
• “How do you ensure scans cover all in-scope assets, including cloud and remote endpoints?”
• “Who can approve deferrals, and how do you ensure deferred items are revisited?”
• “How do third parties fit into your flaw remediation process if they operate systems for you?”
• “Do you have an emergency path for urgent patches, and does it still produce evidence?”

Hangups that trigger findings:

• No durable system of record (or multiple queues without reconciliation)
• Closure without proof (tickets closed as “patched” with no verification step)
• Exceptions that never expire
• Asset inventory drift (scanners don’t cover what you think you own)

Frequent implementation mistakes (and how to avoid them)

1. Treating vulnerability scanning as SI-2 compliance.
   Fix: enforce the ticket-to-change-to-verification chain for a sample set each cycle.

2. No single accountable owner for remediation outcomes.
   Fix: define one operational owner for the remediation program, plus resolver group owners by platform.

3. “We patch monthly” with no evidence of what changed.
   Fix: tie patch deployments to change records and link them to the remediation tickets.

4. Third-party blind spot.
   Fix: require third parties to provide patch/vulnerability reporting artifacts, and ingest those into your SI-2 tracking process when they operate in-scope components.

5. Exception sprawl.
   Fix: add expirations, periodic review, and compensating control validation steps to every exception record.

Enforcement context and risk implications

No public enforcement cases were provided in the source catalog for this requirement, so this page avoids naming specific actions. Practically, SI-2 failures increase the likelihood that known weaknesses persist in production systems, which raises breach and outage risk and complicates incident response because you cannot quickly prove what was fixed, when, and where. ¹

Practical execution plan (30/60/90-day)

First 30 days: establish the minimum viable SI-2 workflow

• Name the SI-2 control owner and remediation program owner; publish RACI.
• Inventory in-scope asset classes and identify current detection sources.
• Standardize one ticket template for flaws (required fields + definitions).
• Define verification rules (what counts as proof of fix).
• Stand up an exceptions workflow with approval and review fields.

Days 31–60: connect tools and tighten traceability

• Automate ingestion from scanners/advisories into the ticket queue where possible.
• Link remediation tickets to change records (standard and emergency).
• Create a weekly aging review with resolver leads; document actions and escalations.
• Pilot a sampling-based “audit trail” exercise: take recent findings and ensure end-to-end evidence exists.

Days 61–90: make it durable and assessment-ready

• Expand coverage to harder areas (containers, golden images, ephemeral cloud resources, remote endpoints).
• Build SI-2 reporting: backlog aging, exceptions by owner, verification completion, recurring issues.
• Run a tabletop audit: have an internal assessor request samples and walk through evidence.
• In Daydream, map SI-2 to the control owner, the implementation procedure, and the recurring evidence artifacts so evidence collection becomes routine rather than a scramble. ²

Frequently Asked Questions

Does SI-2 require a specific patch timeline (for example, 30 days)?

SI-2’s excerpt does not specify a fixed timeline; it requires that you identify, report, and correct flaws. Set internal remediation targets by risk and prove you follow them with tickets, change records, and verification evidence. ²

What counts as a “system flaw” under SI-2?

Treat vulnerabilities, missing patches, insecure configurations, and defective security-relevant code paths as flaws if they could affect confidentiality, integrity, or availability. Your procedure should define your categories and the tools or sources that detect them. ¹

How do we show “reporting” if engineers fix issues quickly without tickets?

Create a rule: no fix is considered complete until there is a record in the system of record with owner, dates, and verification. Auditors will accept fast remediation, but they still expect traceability. ¹

Do third parties have to follow our SI-2 process?

If a third party operates in-scope components, you need a way to ensure flaws are identified, tracked, and corrected for those components. Contractual requirements and shared evidence (patch attestations, scan outputs, remediation tickets) are common ways to bridge that gap. ¹

What evidence is most likely to fail an audit for SI-2?

Missing verification evidence is the most common operational gap: tickets marked closed without a re-scan, re-test, or other validation artifact. The second is unmanaged exceptions that lack an approval trail and review date. ¹

We have multiple scanners and ticketing systems. Is that a problem?

Multiple tools are workable if you can reconcile them into one auditable view: consistent identifiers, clear ownership, and a way to demonstrate end-to-end closure for sampled findings. If you cannot produce that thread, consolidate intake or build integration and governance around it. ¹

Footnotes

1. NIST SP 800-53 Rev. 5

2. NIST SP 800-53 Rev. 5 OSCAL JSON