- Adopt sanitization methods per media type from NIST SP 800-88 — cryptographic erase, purge, or destruction — and write down which applies to what.
- Catch the forgotten media: multifunction-printer disks, leased-equipment returns, warranty-replaced drives, and OT equipment shipped for vendor repair.
- If a destruction vendor is used, keep certificates per lot or serial number rather than a generic annual attestation.
03.08.03OFFICIAL TITLEPENDING NIST SME REVIEW
03.08.03 — Media Sanitization
03.08 Media Protection · NIST SP 800-171 Rev. 3
Independent summary of the official requirement
Requires sanitizing system media that contain CUI prior to disposal, release out of organizational control, or release for reuse.
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
Deleted is not gone. Before a drive, device, copier, or paper record leaves your control — sold, recycled, returned off lease, reassigned outside the CUI boundary — the CUI on it must be genuinely unrecoverable, by methods matched to the media type.
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
- Sanitization records or destruction certificates keyed to serial numbers
- The written sanitization procedure by media type
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 |