# AC-5 — Separation of Duties

- **Control ID:** AC-5
- **Family:** [AC](/md/families/AC.md)
- **Baselines:** moderate, high
- **Enhancement of:** No content available.

## Description

Identify and document \[assignment\] ; and Define system access authorizations to support separation of duties.

## Discussion

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 \[AC-2\](\#ac-2) , access control mechanisms in \[AC-3\](\#ac-3) , and identity management activities in \[IA-2\](\#ia-2), \[IA-4\](\#ia-4) , and \[IA-12\](\#ia-12).

## Implementation guidance

No content available.

## CSF 2.0 subcategories

- [PR.AA-05](/md/csf/PR.AA-05.md) — Access permissions, entitlements, and authorizations are defined in a policy, managed, enforced, and reviewed, and incorporate the principles of least privilege and separation of duties

## Related controls

- [AC-2](/md/controls/AC-2.md)
- [AC-3](/md/controls/AC-3.md)
- [AC-6](/md/controls/AC-6.md)
- [AU-9](/md/controls/AU-9.md)
- [CM-5](/md/controls/CM-5.md)
- [CM-11](/md/controls/CM-11.md)
- [CP-9](/md/controls/CP-9.md)
- [IA-2](/md/controls/IA-2.md)
- [IA-4](/md/controls/IA-4.md)
- [IA-5](/md/controls/IA-5.md)
- [IA-12](/md/controls/IA-12.md)
- [MA-3](/md/controls/MA-3.md)
- [MA-5](/md/controls/MA-5.md)
- [PS-2](/md/controls/PS-2.md)
- [SA-8](/md/controls/SA-8.md)
- [SA-17](/md/controls/SA-17.md)

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Derived from official NIST publications (NIST SP 800-53 Rev 5 and NIST CSF 2.0). nistcontrols.com is not affiliated with NIST.