- Modern operating systems and hypervisors handle object reuse internally; the exposure is in what organizations build on top — shared folders, scratch space, print servers, and terminal servers where sessions genuinely share resources.
- Give multi-user platforms explicit attention: verify session isolation on terminal servers, shared workstations, and any homegrown application that pools resources across users.
3.13.4OFFICIAL STATEMENT BELOWDERIVED REQUIREMENTPENDING NIST SME REVIEW
3.13.4 — Shared resource information control
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)
Prevent unauthorized and unintended information transfer via shared system resources.
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
Information must not leak between users through the system's shared plumbing — reused memory, reallocated storage, shared temp space, multi-tenant caches. One session's residue must not become the next session's discovery.
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
- Platform documentation or configuration for session and memory isolation on shared systems
- A dated check of shared storage and temporary locations for residual CUI
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 |