- Mainstream directories and identity providers handle this internally; the exposure is in the seams — legacy applications with homegrown tables, scripts with embedded credentials, protocols that transmit cleartext.
- Sweep configuration files, automation, and repositories for stored credentials; that is where this requirement actually fails in practice.
3.5.10OFFICIAL STATEMENT BELOWDERIVED REQUIREMENTPENDING NIST SME REVIEW
3.5.10 — Cryptographic password protection
3.5 Identification and Authentication · 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)
Store and transmit only cryptographically-protected passwords.
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
Passwords exist in storage and in transit only under cryptographic protection — salted, modern hashes at rest; encrypted channels in motion. A cleartext password anywhere in the pipeline is the finding.
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
- Vendor documentation or configuration for credential storage in each system holding passwords
- A dated credential-hygiene sweep of scripts, repositories, and configuration stores
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 |