- Prefer platform-managed keys — cloud key services, OS key stores, managed certificates — over homegrown handling; most organizations should manage exceptions, not build key infrastructure.
- Inventory keys and certificates with owners and expiry dates, and alert before expiry rather than after the outage.
- Escrow recovery keys (disk encryption especially) somewhere that survives the loss of both the person and the device.
03.13.10OFFICIAL TITLEPENDING NIST SME REVIEW
03.13.10 — Cryptographic Key Establishment and Management
03.13 System and Communications Protection · NIST SP 800-171 Rev. 3
Independent summary of the official requirement
Requires establishing and managing cryptographic keys in the system in accordance with organization-defined key management requirements.
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
Every encrypted thing depends on a key someone must generate, store, distribute, rotate, and eventually destroy. Key management is where cryptography actually fails in small organizations — the certificate that expires in production, the recovery keys nobody escrowed, the secret embedded in a script — and this requirement makes that lifecycle deliberate instead of accidental.
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
- The key management requirements the organization defined and operates under
- A key and certificate inventory with rotation and expiry tracking
- Escrow and revocation records
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 |