- Keep an approved-tools list and treat unfamiliar vendor kit arriving on site as untrusted until inspected — the diagnostic laptop that has visited fifty other plants is the classic carrier.
- Third parties count: integrators and service technicians are maintenance personnel even when they are badged as visitors, and their access deserves the same oversight as an employee's.
- In OT environments, vendor maintenance is frequently the least-governed pathway into production equipment; align this requirement's oversight with brokered remote access and supervised sessions.
3.7.2OFFICIAL STATEMENT BELOWBASIC REQUIREMENTPENDING NIST SME REVIEW
3.7.2 — Maintenance controls
3.7 Maintenance · 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)
Provide controls on the tools, techniques, mechanisms, and personnel used to conduct system maintenance.
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
The tools and people that maintain systems are themselves an attack path — a technician's laptop, a vendor's USB stick, a diagnostic utility running with deep privilege. This requirement puts deliberate oversight on who and what is allowed to perform maintenance, and how.
Across revisions
Rev. 3 withdraws 03.07.01 through 03.07.03 and splits this requirement's substance: oversight of tools, techniques, and mechanisms goes to Maintenance Tools (03.07.04); oversight of maintenance personnel goes to Maintenance Personnel (03.07.06).
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
- An approved maintenance tool list with an owner
- Maintenance session records naming the personnel and tools involved
- Vendor maintenance agreements and the access records behind them
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 |