- Turn on breached- and banned-password screening where the identity provider offers it — this is the requirement's center of gravity, and it does more for real security than character-class rules ever did.
- Update the screening list on a schedule and when compromise is suspected; a stale list is the quiet failure mode.
- Sweep the seams for cleartext: appliance logins, scripts, and legacy applications with homegrown credential tables are where the cryptographic-protection elements actually fail.
- Set composition rules consistent with SP 800-63B — length over complexity arithmetic — and document the choice as the defined parameter.
03.05.07OFFICIAL TITLEPENDING NIST SME REVIEW
03.05.07 — Password Management
03.05 Identification and Authentication · NIST SP 800-171 Rev. 3
Independent summary of the official requirement
Requires maintaining an updated list of commonly used, expected, or compromised passwords and verifying that new or changed passwords are not on it; transmitting passwords only over cryptographically protected channels and storing them in cryptographically protected form; selecting a new password upon first use after account recovery; and enforcing organization-defined password composition and complexity rules.
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
Rev. 3 retires password theater. Instead of composition arithmetic and scheduled rotation: screen every new password against known-breached and commonly-used lists, protect passwords cryptographically everywhere they exist, and force a fresh one after account recovery. Complexity rules survive only as an organization-defined choice.
Across revisions
Consolidates Rev. 2's 3.5.7 through 3.5.10 into one requirement aligned with SP 800-63B: breached- and common-password screening replaces mandated complexity-and-change arithmetic, cryptographic protection in storage and transit carries over, a first-use-after-recovery change replaces the temporary-password rule, and history-based reuse counts drop out.
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
- Screening configuration and list-update records
- Storage and transmission protections per credential store
- The documented composition rules
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 |