NIST SP 800-53 Rev. 5 AU-1 — Policy And Procedures

What this control requires

Develops, documents, and disseminates audit and accountability policies and procedures, addressing roles, compliance, and updates based on organizational needs. This control supports the Policy Management System capability within the Audit and Accountability family.

In plain English

Develops, documents, and disseminates audit and accountability policies and procedures, addressing roles, compliance, and updates based on organizational needs. In practice, this means you can prove you policy procedures-level controls on a defined cadence.

Why it matters

SP 800-53 is the catalogue every U.S. federal authorisation (FedRAMP, FISMA, CMMC) and most regulated industries point at. A missing control surfaces as a Plan of Action & Milestones (POA&M) item that an Authorizing Official must approve before the Authority To Operate is granted or renewed.

What an auditor looks for

A 3PAO (FedRAMP) or Independent Assessor (NIST RMF) tests against NIST SP 800-53A assessment procedures. For each control they expect a documented implementation that addresses every assessment objective (Examine, Interview, Test) and an implementation summary in the System Security Plan.

Within Audit and Accountability, the assessor will trace your implementation back to the catalogue reference (Control AU-1) and look for objective evidence on the latest two assessment cycles.

How to implement

Logging Monitoring

AWS. Org-trail CloudTrail to a central log archive account, GuardDuty in every region, and Security Hub for cross-source correlation.

Azure. Pipe every diagnostic setting into a central Log Analytics workspace; onboard Microsoft Sentinel for SIEM/SOAR.

GCP. Aggregate audit logs in a dedicated logging project with sink to BigQuery; enable Security Command Center Premium and route findings to Chronicle SIEM.

Policy Management

Docs. Keep each policy in version-controlled Markdown alongside the code that implements it; ship a signed PDF snapshot at each annual review and link the SHA into the SoA.

Operational checklist

• Policy. Document the trigger, the owner and the cadence.
• Audit. Document the trigger, the owner and the cadence.
• System. Document the trigger, the owner and the cadence.
• Control. Document the trigger, the owner and the cadence.
• Compliance. Document the trigger, the owner and the cadence.
• Scope: procedures, management, system, compliance, updates, capability, documents, accountability.

Evidence to collect

• Policy Document. A signed and version-controlled policy / standard / procedure document.

Signed policy or standard documents the safeguard. Focus: Policy And Procedures.

Common pitfalls

• Per-account logging that nobody stitches together at the org level — incidents that cross accounts go undetected for days.
• Policies that no engineer has read; the version in Confluence drifts from the version that's actually being enforced.

How it maps to other frameworks

Computed from shared tags, control component and key-operation subjects — handy when you are reconciling controls across an audit.

• HIPAA (45 CFR Part 164) 164.308(a)(5)(ii)(A) — Security Awareness and Training - Security Reminders
• NIST SP 800-171 Rev. 3 3.3.7 — Time Stamps
• SOC 2 (2017 TSC) A1.3 — Testing of System Recovery Procedures
• ISO/IEC 27001:2022 A.8.15 — Logging

Related controls in NIST SP 800-53 Rev. 5

• Control AT-1 — Policy And Procedures
• Control AU-5(5) — Alternate Audit Logging Capability
• Control AU-14 — Session Audit
• Control AU-14(1) — System Start-Up
• Control CP-1 — Policy And Procedures
• Control SA-1 — Policy And Procedures

References

• NIST Computer Security Resource Center — NIST SP 800-53 Rev. 5
• Catalogue identifier: Control AU-1

Topics: governance risklogging monitoringpolicy management