mcsb

Microsoft Cloud Security Benchmark — Skill Entry

This SKILL.md is the entrypoint for the Microsoft Cloud Security Benchmark (MCSB) skill.

The skill encodes the durable, structurally stable layer of MCSB — the control-domain taxonomy and a domain-grain crosswalk to NIST SP 800-53 and CIS Controls — so the Security Planner and Security Reviewer can map and assess Azure cloud resources against a consistent control vocabulary.

The skill deliberately does not embed the volatile layer of MCSB (per-Azure-service security baselines, per-service control IDs, Azure Policy mappings, and Defender for Cloud assessment specifics). That content changes on Microsoft's release cadence and is retrieved at runtime through the Researcher Subagent per references/lookup-playbook.md.

Version and stability

This skill targets MCSB v2, which Microsoft marks as preview and which supersedes MCSB v1. Content is version-pinned and retrieval-dated (2026-07-21). MCSB v2 replaces v1's Governance and Strategy (GS) domain with an Artificial Intelligence Security (AI) domain, and maps to NIST SP 800-53 Rev. 5 and CIS Controls v8.1 (v1 mapped to Rev. 4 and CIS v8). Re-verify the taxonomy and mappings against the official source before relying on them for a compliance decision.

Normative references

1. 00 Control Index
2. 01 Network Security
3. 02 Identity Management
4. 03 Privileged Access
5. 04 Data Protection
6. 05 Asset Management
7. 06 Logging and Threat Detection
8. 07 Incident Response
9. 08 Posture and Vulnerability Management
10. 09 Endpoint Security
11. 10 Backup and Recovery
12. 11 DevOps Security
13. 12 Artificial Intelligence Security
14. Lookup Playbook — delegation guardrail for volatile per-service lookups.

Skill layout

• SKILL.md — this file (skill entrypoint).
• references/ — the MCSB durable reference documents.
  • 00-control-index.md — control-domain catalog, consolidated crosswalk, and attribution.
  • 01 through 12 — one document per MCSB v2 control domain with assessment checklists.
  • lookup-playbook.md — delegation guardrail for volatile per-service content.

Attribution

Reference content in this skill is original prose that paraphrases publicly documented MCSB structure. The MCSB v2 (preview) documentation this skill cites is published on Microsoft Learn from a non-public source repository and is governed by the Microsoft Learn Terms of Use, not a public Creative Commons license. The separate, older MicrosoftDocs/SecurityBenchmarks repository is CC BY 4.0, but its benchmark spreadsheets stop at Azure Security Benchmark v3 (the pre-rename lineage) and Microsoft Cloud Security Benchmark v1; it does not contain the MCSB v2 (preview) content this skill cites. Because this skill paraphrases rather than reproduces upstream text, no verbatim-reproduction license grant applies; it cites the canonical source in each reference file. See references/00-control-index.md for the consolidated attribution.