- Follow the NARA CUI marking handbook and any contract-specific marking direction rather than inventing labels; wrong markings are their own problem.
- Marking discipline is downstream of knowing where CUI is — this requirement inherits the media sweep done for 3.8.1.
3.8.4OFFICIAL STATEMENT BELOWDERIVED REQUIREMENTPENDING NIST SME REVIEW
3.8.4 — Media marking
3.8 Media 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)
Mark media with necessary CUI markings and distribution limitations.
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
Media holding CUI is labeled so handlers know what they are holding: cover sheets on paper, labels on drives and tapes, distribution-limitation markings where the underlying CUI category requires them.
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
- Marked samples or photographs of labeled media
- The marking procedure and any training records for the people who handle media
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 |