- Badge systems produce this automatically; the work is exporting and retaining the events rather than letting the controller overwrite them.
- Paper sign-in sheets are legitimate where volume is low, but they must be retained, legible, and actually collected — a binder that walks away is not a log.
- Set retention deliberately and align it with the window in which incidents are realistically discovered and investigated.
3.10.4OFFICIAL STATEMENT BELOWDERIVED REQUIREMENTPENDING NIST SME REVIEW
3.10.4 — Physical access logs
3.10 Physical Protection · 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)
Maintain audit logs of physical access.
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
A record exists of who entered protected areas and when — badge-system events or a paper log — kept long enough to answer an investigator's questions months later.
Across revisions
Rev. 3 withdraws the standalone slot (03.10.04); physical access logging continues inside Physical Access Control, 03.10.07.
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
- Retained physical-access logs for the protected areas
- The retention setting or written retention rule
- A sampled reconciliation of log entries against the area's authorization list
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 |