Software Engineering Institute

On a weekly basis, the U.S. Postal Service (USPS) processes over one million packages destined to overseas locations. All international shipments being sent from the United States are subject to federal export laws. The USPS has extensive export compliance policies and screening procedures to ensure that customers comply with federal export laws.

Compliance policies and screening procedures are expensive and time consuming, and can negatively affect the efficiency of international mail delivery services. The U.S. Postal Inspection Service (USPIS) has defined, developed, and successfully implemented an innovative approach for export screening that has drastically improved its efficiency, effectiveness, and accuracy.  Having benefited from using concepts of operational resilience management to improve the security and resilience of USPS products and services, the USPIS team conducted its new export screening project using a structured and repeatable approach based on the CERT Resilience Management Model (CERT-RMM), developed by the Software Engineering Institute at Carnegie Mellon University.

This report describes how the CERT-RMM enabled the USPIS to implement an innovative approach for achieving complex international mail export control objectives. The authors also discuss how this USPIS application of CERT-RMM might be equally applicable to other shipping and transportation sectors that are tasked with meeting export control objectives.