  Enforcing security requirements in networked information systems relies on
security controls to mitigate the risks from increasingly dangerous threats.
Configuring security controls is challenging; even nowadays, administrators
must perform it without adequate tool support. Hence, this process is plagued
by errors that translate to insecure postures, security incidents, and a lack
of promptness in answering threats. This paper presents the Security Capability
Model (SCM), a formal model that abstracts the features that security controls
offer for enforcing security policies, which includes an Information Model that
depicts the basic concepts related to rules (i.e., conditions, actions, events)
and policies (i.e., conditions' evaluation, resolution strategies, default
actions), and a Data Model that covers the capabilities needed to describe
different types of filtering and channel protection controls. Following
state-of-the-art design patterns, the model allows for generating abstract
versions of the security controls' languages and a model-driven approach for
translating abstract policies into device-specific configuration settings. By
validating its effectiveness in real-world scenarios, we show that SCM enables
the automation of different and complex security tasks, i.e., accurate and
granular security control comparison, policy refinement, and incident response.
Lastly, we present opportunities for extensions and integration with other
frameworks and models.
