Today, we are officially announcing the launch of the Compliance Signal Enumeration (CSE) Registry.
The CSE Registry is a public, structured, and extensible registry for defining, identifying, and operationalizing compliance signals: the atomic, machine-readable indicators that compliance frameworks, audits, and continuous assurance programs ultimately rely on.
It is available at: https://cseregistry.org
Open-source repository: https://github.com/DataHubz/cse-registry
This launch represents a foundational step toward treating compliance not as documentation, but as infrastructure.
The Problem: Compliance Without a Shared Vocabulary
Modern compliance frameworks (ISO 27001, SOC 2, CMMC, NIST 800-171, GDPR, HIPAA, and others) are increasingly operationalized through tools, APIs, scanners, controls, and automated evidence collection.
Yet the industry lacks a shared, canonical way to describe what is actually being measured.
- What is a "signal" that indicates password policy enforcement?
- How do we describe, consistently, a control outcome versus an observation versus derived evidence?
- How do we reference the same operational fact across tools, vendors, audits, and time?
Without a shared vocabulary:
- Evidence becomes ambiguous
- Automation becomes brittle
- Integrations become custom and costly
- Trust degrades across organizational and vendor boundaries
The CSE Registry exists to solve this problem at the infrastructure layer.
What the CSE Registry Is
The CSE Registry is a canonical registry of compliance signals, designed to be:
Framework-agnostic
Signals are not tied to a single standard or certification.
Machine-readable by default
Signals are designed for APIs, scanners, agents, and automated systems.
Human-auditable
Definitions remain readable, reviewable, and traceable.
Extensible and versioned
Signals evolve without breaking downstream consumers.
At its core, the registry defines what a compliance signal is, how it is uniquely identified, and how it can be referenced consistently across systems.
This mirrors the role that CVEs play in vulnerability management or that IANA registries play in internet infrastructure, applied to compliance.
From Documentation to Signals
Traditional compliance workflows focus on documents, screenshots, and point-in-time artifacts.
Modern compliance requires signals:
- Observable
- Reproducible
- Time-bound
- Automatable
- Verifiable
Examples include:
- "Multi-factor authentication enforced for all privileged accounts"
- "Disk encryption enabled on all managed endpoints"
- "Audit logging retained for X days and protected from modification"
The CSE Registry provides a structured way to describe these signals so they can be:
- Collected programmatically
- Evaluated consistently
- Referenced across audits
- Anchored to evidence systems
Open by Design
The CSE Registry is open source and publicly accessible.
This is intentional.
Compliance infrastructure only works when it is:
- Inspectable
- Neutral
- Widely adopted
- Not locked to a single vendor or platform
The open repository allows:
- Community review and contribution
- Transparency in definitions and evolution
- Integration by tooling vendors, assessors, and internal teams
- Long-term stability independent of any single commercial product
DataHubz maintains the registry, but its value increases with participation from the broader compliance and security community.
How It Is Intended to Be Used
The CSE Registry is not a compliance product. It is compliance infrastructure.
It is designed to support:
- Compliance platforms
- Internal GRC systems
- Security scanners
- Evidence pipelines
- Continuous monitoring tools
- Audit and assessment workflows
Typical use cases include:
- Referencing signals in APIs and reports
- Normalizing outputs from heterogeneous tools
- Mapping operational telemetry to compliance controls
- Enabling cross-framework evidence reuse
- Supporting cryptographic or verifiable evidence systems
The registry provides a stable reference point around which tooling can evolve without semantic drift.
Why DataHubz Built This
At DataHubz, our focus is compliance technologies and compliance infrastructure.
As we built systems for:
- Evidence automation
- Continuous compliance
- Verifiable compliance evidence
- Cross-framework mapping
It became clear that the industry was missing a shared, low-level abstraction.
The CSE Registry fills that gap.
It is not an endpoint. It is a foundation.
What Comes Next
This launch marks the beginning, not the conclusion.
Next steps include:
- Expansion of the signal catalog
- Community contribution workflows
- Deeper mappings to major frameworks
- Integration with tooling and APIs
- Alignment with verifiable and cryptographic evidence models
We expect the registry to evolve alongside the industry's shift toward continuous, machine-assisted, and provable compliance.
An Invitation to the Community
We invite:
- Compliance professionals
- Security engineers
- GRC platform builders
- Auditors and assessors
- Researchers and standards contributors
to explore the registry, review the definitions, and participate in its evolution.
Compliance works best when its foundations are shared.
CSE Registry
A public infrastructure for compliance signals.
Website: https://cseregistry.org
