system account
163495·updated Aug 30, 2026A credentialed identity established on a system through which a user, process, or service is authorized to access system resources. The account carries the attributes that govern that access - its authorized users, its group and role membership, and its access privileges - and is managed across a lifecycle of creation, enablement, modification, disablement and removal. Account types are enumerated by the controlling framework rather than assumed: NIST SP 800-171r3 and SP 800-53 name individual, group, temporary, system, guest, anonymous, emergency, developer and service accounts, several of which an organization may prohibit outright because of the risk they carry. The phrase is a term of art and it is the umbrella term rather than one of the types: "system" appears in that list as a single account type, while a privileged account is defined as a system account holding the authorizations of a privileged user.
Source
Define the types of system accounts allowed and prohibited.the sentence this term was read in
generalized from a web lookup of the quoted expression at proposal time Verdict: term of art.
- 03.01.01 Account Management - NIST SP 800-171r3
- privileged account - Glossary | CSRC
- AC-2 Account Management - NIST SP 800-53r5
- Application And System Accounts - PCI Guru
A definition generalized from search results is a draft to react to, not provenance. Confirm it against an authority document before this term is verified.
Proposed during multiword review of this document in the CKI mapping queue.
Attested in
Classifications
Entity Type
Sensitivity
Information Class
Variants
- plural
- system accounts
- possessive
- system account's
- pluralpossessive
- system accounts'
Framework definitions
- §1 · attested_usage_reviewer_confirmed
- No definition is given in NIST SP 800-171r3. The term is attested in use at 13 citations in that document; a definition is pending curation.Increment 2: attested in 800-171r3 without a glossary definition.
- §1 · web_lookup_draft
- A credentialed identity established on a system through which a user, process, or service is authorized to access system resources. The account carries the attributes that govern that access - its authorized users, its group and role membership, and its access privileges - and is managed across a lifecycle of creation, enablement, modification, disablement and removal. Account types are enumerated by the controlling framework rather than assumed: NIST SP 800-171r3 and SP 800-53 name individual, group, temporary, system, guest, anonymous, emergency, developer and service accounts, several of which an organization may prohibit outright because of the risk they carry. The phrase is a term of art and it is the umbrella term rather than one of the types: "system" appears in that list as a single account type, while a privileged account is defined as a system account holding the authorizations of a privileged user.DR-088 backfill from the noun definition column