- Enforce prevention in the operating system and applications: elevation prompts tied to authorized accounts, admin tools restricted to admin roles.
- Turn on auditing for privileged operations — account changes, policy changes, security tool modifications — and confirm the events actually arrive somewhere retained.
3.1.7OFFICIAL STATEMENT BELOWDERIVED REQUIREMENTPENDING NIST SME REVIEW
3.1.7 — Privileged function control
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)
Prevent non-privileged users from executing privileged functions and capture the execution of such functions in audit logs.
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
Users without privileges must be technically unable to run privileged functions — not merely told not to — and every execution of a privileged function lands in a log. The logging half matters as much as the prevention half: when something privileged happens, you can see who did it.
Across revisions
Becomes Rev. 3's Least Privilege — Privileged Functions (03.01.07).
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
- Configuration showing elevation and admin tooling restricted to authorized accounts
- Audit policy exports and sampled log entries for privileged operations
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 |