Trusted Internet Connections 3.0
The federal program that replaced a single physical internet gateway with trust zones and distributed policy enforcement, together with a capability catalog and a set of use cases.
What This Framework Contributes.
The framework borrows TIC’s boundary vocabulary and contributes nothing to its capability catalog. It draws the zones an agency already documents and then asks what can cross them.
- Trust zones and policy enforcement points as the vocabulary the terrain overlay is drawn in, so a zone crossing on the map is the same crossing the agency already documents.
- Reachability analysis across those boundaries — whether a defined zone actually constrains movement, which is a question a capability catalog cannot ask.
- A register of connections and denied paths, which is what turns a boundary from a diagram into something testable.
What it does not do for TIC 3.0.
Read this before the crosswalk, not after it. A reader who takes the mappings below as coverage of TIC 3.0 will be wrong in a way that is expensive to discover later.
- A mapping to the TIC capability catalog.The universal and policy-enforcement-point security capabilities are not crosswalked here. Claiming capability-level coverage on the strength of a boundary vocabulary would be an overstatement, and an easily checked one.
- Use case selection.The framework does not tell an agency which use case to adopt. It requires only that whichever boundaries exist are on the map and that traffic crossing them is observed.
- Telemetry to CISA.No feed, no format, no participation in the program’s reporting. The observation the framework requires is the agency’s own and stays there.
4 elements, each with what is missing.
TIC 3.0 publishes no control-level index for a catalog to be turned round against, so these edges are authored rather than derived. Each one is stated as a citation and resolved against the real catalog when the site is built: the prose can go stale, the links cannot go dead.
Trust zones
2 controls · T3 NetworksTraffic is segmented into zones of differing trust, and the boundaries between them are defined explicitly rather than implied by physical topology.
Zone definition is a control here, and the overlay is drawn in the zones the agency already documents — so a boundary on the map is the same boundary the program recognizes.
The framework does not define an agency’s zones for it, and it says nothing about which trust level a given zone should carry.
Policy enforcement points
3 controls · T3 NetworksSecurity capabilities are applied at distributed enforcement points positioned between trust zones, rather than at a single physical gateway.
An enforcement point is a locatable element on the overlay, which is what allows it to be designated a decisive point and given a protection floor that does not move with the budget.
The capability catalog is not crosswalked. A framework control that names an enforcement point makes no claim about which of the program’s capabilities it implements.
Declared traffic flows
2 controls · T3 NetworksThe flows crossing each boundary are known, and the ones that are not permitted are known to be not permitted.
The connection and denied-path register records both halves. A denied path that nothing tests is a belief, so avenue-of-approach analysis exists to test it.
Enforcement is the agency’s. The register states what should cross and what should not; whether the device agrees is an assessment result, not a register entry.
Telemetry and shared visibility
2 controls · TX Cross-CuttingAgencies provide the program with visibility of traffic crossing their boundaries, in the formats the program specifies.
Nothing directly. The framework requires that crossings be observed and that the observation stay current, which is a precondition for having anything to share.
No feed, no format, no participation in the program’s reporting. Observation required by this framework is the agency’s own and stays with the agency.
Authored edges, derived resolution. Each program element cites control ids and, where the ground is specific, the terrain layer it sits on. What the framework takes from this source and what it declines to take is set out in sources and provenance; the controls named on this page each carry their full lineage on their own sheet.