- Choose and document trigger conditions per access type — remote sessions, admin consoles, and web sessions deserve different lifetimes.
- Configure idle and maximum session lifetimes in the VPN or ZTNA platform, the identity provider, and the admin planes.
- Verify termination invalidates the session token, not just the visible window; a reusable token defeats the point.
03.01.11OFFICIAL TITLEPENDING NIST SME REVIEW
03.01.11 — Session Termination
03.01 Access Control · NIST SP 800-171 Rev. 3
Independent summary of the official requirement
Requires automatically terminating a user session after organization-defined conditions or trigger events requiring session disconnect (aligned to SP 800-53 AC-12). Termination ends the logical session itself, as distinct from locking the device display.
Rev. 3 requirement text is multi-part and parameterized with organization-defined values, so this site summarizes rather than reproduces it. The summary is independent — read the official publication for the binding wording.
NIST SP 800-171 Rev. 3 — Protecting CUI in Nonfederal Systems ↗NIST SP 800-171A Rev. 3 — Assessing Security Requirements for CUI ↗Independent interpretation
What this requirement is after
A lock hides the screen; termination ends the session. You define the events that kill a session outright — idle time on a VPN, an admin console left open overnight, a risk signal from the identity platform — and the system enforces them. The concrete wins for a small contractor are VPN idle disconnects and bounded admin-portal session lifetimes.
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
- Session-lifetime and disconnect configuration for remote access and admin surfaces
- Logs showing sessions terminated on the defined conditions
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 came from in Rev. 2
Provenance
Sources and review status
| Primary sources | NIST SP 800-171 Rev. 3 — Protecting CUI in Nonfederal Systems · NIST SP 800-171A Rev. 3 — Assessing Security Requirements for CUI |
|---|---|
| Review status | Pending NIST SME review |
| Content version | 1.0 |
| Updated |