Beyond the IT Checklist: Engineering a Reasonable Standard of Care for Cyber Safety

Computer Science > Cryptography and Security [Submitted on 11 Jun 2026] Beyond the IT Checklist: Engineering a Reasonable Standard of Care for Cyber Safety Matthew E. Jablonski, Linton Wells II, Kathryn B. Laskey, F. Brett Berlin Current U.S. cyber policy, centered on security, often treats documentation of controls and incident reports as a proxy for safety in the built environment. This paper argues that such an approach is inadequate for cyber-physical systems, where digital failures can produce kinetic harm. We construct and code a corpus of critical infrastructure policy documents (N=292, 2000-2025) to examine how "reasonable care" is operationalized across the NIST SP 800-160 Vol.~2 resilience lifecycle. The resulting maps show that obligations are concentrated in the Anticipate phase and emphasize administrative compliance, while Withstand and Recover phases rely heavily on delegated references to IT-focused control catalogs that are poorly aligned with physics-based hazards. We identify three major disconnects: miscalibrated delegated standards, recovery defined as notification rather than engineered navigation, and uneven adaptation requirements across sectors. We then propose a modernized standard of care anchored in hazard-specific traceability, structured assurance cases, and cyber resiliency engineering. Finally, we recommend that federal policy pair these engineering obligations with targeted incentives so that resilient architectures for critical infrastructure become a viable business decision rather than an unfunded expectation. Comments: 6 pages, 2 figures, Accepted for publication and presentation the Cyber Safety Summit, Washington, D.C., 2026 Subjects: Cryptography and Security (cs.CR) Cite as: arXiv:2606.13612 [cs.CR]   (or arXiv:2606.13612v1 [cs.CR] for this version)   https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2606.13612 Focus to learn more Submission history From: Matthew Jablonski [view email] [v1] Thu, 11 Jun 2026 17:25:07 UTC (248 KB) Access Paper: HTML (experimental) view license Current browse context: cs.CR < prev   |   next > new | recent | 2026-06 Change to browse by: cs References & Citations NASA ADS Google Scholar Semantic Scholar Export BibTeX Citation Bookmark Bibliographic Tools Bibliographic and Citation Tools Bibliographic Explorer Toggle Bibliographic Explorer (What is the Explorer?) Connected Papers Toggle Connected Papers (What is Connected Papers?) Litmaps Toggle Litmaps (What is Litmaps?) scite.ai Toggle scite Smart Citations (What are Smart Citations?) Code, Data, Media Demos Related Papers About arXivLabs Which authors of this paper are endorsers? | Disable MathJax (What is MathJax?)