- Define the terminating conditions per access type — VPN and remote portals usually get shorter limits than interactive desktops — and write them down.
- Verify the settings on the systems that matter most: remote access infrastructure and administrative sessions, where an abandoned session is most valuable to an attacker.
3.1.11OFFICIAL STATEMENT BELOWDERIVED REQUIREMENTPENDING NIST SME REVIEW
3.1.11 — Session termination
3.1 Access Control · NIST SP 800-171 Rev. 2 · The heading label is this site's navigational shorthand; the official language is the statement below.
Official requirement statement (verbatim)
Terminate (automatically) a user session after a defined condition.
NIST SP 800-171 Rev. 2 — Protecting CUI in Nonfederal Systems ↗NIST SP 800-171A — Assessing Security Requirements for CUI ↗Independent interpretation
What this requirement is after
Beyond locking, sessions end. After a condition you define — hours of inactivity, end of a maintenance window, a detected anomaly — the session terminates and the user authenticates fresh, so forgotten connections do not live forever.
Mapped practices
Brilliant at the Basics practices that support this requirement
No practice maps to this requirement — deliberately.
The campaign’s twenty practices are a priority list, not a control catalog, and none of them works this requirement’s substance directly. It still applies to you if it is in your contract’s scope: address it through your own implementation and the related artifacts below, and treat the absence of a mapping here as honesty, not permission to skip it.
Doing the work
Implementation considerations and evidence
- The documented termination conditions per access type
- Session timeout configuration exports from VPN, portals, and servers
Artifacts
Templates and worksheets with a mapped relationship
No artifact in the library names this requirement yet. The library index groups everything by category and practice.
The other revision
Where this lands in Rev. 3
Provenance
Sources and review status
| Primary sources | NIST SP 800-171 Rev. 2 — Protecting CUI in Nonfederal Systems · NIST SP 800-171A — Assessing Security Requirements for CUI |
|---|---|
| Review status | Pending NIST SME review |
| Content version | 1.0 |
| Updated |