Abstract:

Security baseline is an important part of Microsoft’s security ecosystem, by the use of Security Compliance Manager (SCM) which is able to determine whether the security requirements of users’ application environment are met, providing a basic security assurance for an information system. The concept of security baseline originally coming from the Microsoft’s security configuration initiative for the US Air Force, eventually has been accepted by the US government, and deployed as national standards. This paper discusses and analyzes the origin and progress of Windows security baseline, security compliance manager, the basic concept and implementation rationale of security baseline, deployment and security policy settings of security baseline, and update of security baseline for Windows 8.1.

Key words: security baseline, security compliance manager, organizational unit, group policy object