- Issue each administrator a distinct non-privileged account for daily work and make the privileged one useless for it — no mailbox, no standing web access.
- Watch for drift: convenience pushes people back to doing everything from the powerful account unless the friction is designed out.
3.1.6OFFICIAL STATEMENT BELOWDERIVED REQUIREMENTPENDING NIST SME REVIEW
3.1.6 — Non-privileged account use
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)
Use non-privileged accounts or roles when accessing nonsecurity functions.
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
People with administrative rights read email and browse the web as ordinary users, not as admins. The separate everyday account keeps a phishing click from landing directly in a privileged session.
Across revisions
Becomes Rev. 3's Least Privilege — Privileged Accounts (03.01.06).
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
- Directory records showing paired admin and daily accounts for each administrator
- Sign-in logs demonstrating privileged accounts are not used for mail and web activity
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 |