AC-5 AC · Access Control

Separation of Duties

LOW ✓ MODERATE ✓ HIGH
1 Overlay 16 Related Controls
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Requirements NIST SOURCE

Discussion (NIST Supplemental Guidance)

Separation of duties addresses the potential for abuse of authorized privileges and helps to reduce the risk of malevolent activity without collusion. Separation of duties includes dividing mission or business functions and support functions among different individuals or roles, conducting system support functions with different individuals, and ensuring that security personnel who administer access control functions do not also administer audit functions. Because separation of duty violations can span systems and application domains, organizations consider the entirety of systems and system components when developing policy on separation of duties. Separation of duties is enforced through the account management activities in AC-2 , access control mechanisms in AC-3 , and identity management activities in IA-2, IA-4 , and IA-12.

Implementation Guidance

Engineering Interpretation

Original engineering commentary written for this explorer — not NIST source text and not authoritative guidance.

No engineering interpretation has been authored for AC-5 yet. This section is architected to receive it — see the Requirements and Assessment sections above for the authoritative NIST source content in the meantime.

Assessment

NIST SP 800-53A REV 5.2.0

Assessment Objectives

  1. duties of individuals requiring separation are defined;
  2. <AC-05_ODP duties of individuals> are identified and documented;
  3. system access authorizations to support separation of duties are defined.

Examine

[SELECT FROM: Access control policy; procedures addressing divisions of responsibility and separation of duties; system configuration settings and associated documentation; list of divisions of responsibility and separation of duties; system access authorizations; system audit records; system security plan; other relevant documents or records].

Interview

[SELECT FROM: Organizational personnel with responsibilities for defining appropriate divisions of responsibility and separation of duties; organizational personnel with information security responsibilities; system/network administrators].

Test

[SELECT FROM: Mechanisms implementing separation of duties policy].

Overlays

OT/ICS Overlay SP 800-82r3

NIST SP 800-82r3 Appendix F, Table 22. Blank baseline means the control/control enhancement is not selected in that initial OT baseline.

LOW

Not applicable at this tier.

MODERATE

  • Base control: Included (matches standard baseline)

HIGH

  • Base control: Included (matches standard baseline)

STIGs & CCIs

No STIG checks or CCI mappings are currently loaded for AC-5. This section is architected to display, per product: STIG ID, Finding ID, Severity, Title, Description, Check, Fix, CCI, and NIST control mapping — but nothing is populated here until a real DISA STIG/CCI dataset is ingested.

Learn more about STIG/CCI integration →

Evidence

Potential Evidence — Derived

Categorized from the SP 800-53A "Examine"/"Test" artifact list above by keyword — not an authoritative NIST evidence list.

Policy

  • Access control policy
  • system security plan

Configuration

  • system configuration settings and associated documentation

Testing

  • Mechanisms implementing separation of duties policy

Other Records

  • procedures addressing divisions of responsibility and separation of duties
  • list of divisions of responsibility and separation of duties
  • system access authorizations
  • system audit records
  • other relevant documents or records