- Separate logically at minimum: distinct administrative URLs or ports, restricted to management networks or dedicated admin workstations.
- Cloud consoles count: administrative portals for SaaS and infrastructure need their own access path and stronger session policy than the user-facing service they manage.
3.13.3OFFICIAL STATEMENT BELOWDERIVED REQUIREMENTPENDING NIST SME REVIEW
3.13.3 — User / management functionality separation
3.13 System and Communications 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)
Separate user functionality from system management functionality.
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
Administrative interfaces and everyday user functionality must not share a plane. When management consoles are reachable from ordinary user sessions — same portal, same network path, same browser profile — one phished user sits one step from the settings.
Across revisions
Not carried as a standalone requirement in Rev. 3 — the 03.13.03 slot is withdrawn. The separation concern survives inside boundary and access architecture; verify the official disposition against NIST's analysis of changes before restructuring documentation.
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 management interfaces bound to restricted networks or admin-only access paths
- A dated review of where system management functionality can be reached from
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 |