ITSEC

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The Information Technology Security Evaluation Criteria (ITSEC) is a structured set of criteria for evaluating computer security within products and systems. The ITSEC was first published in May 1990 in France, Germany, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom based on existing work in their respective countries. Following extensive international review, Version 1.2 was subsequently published in June 1991 by the Commission of the European Communities for operational use within evaluation and certification schemes.

France Republic in Europe with several non-European regions

France, officially the French Republic, is a country whose territory consists of metropolitan France in Western Europe and several overseas regions and territories. The metropolitan area of France extends from the Mediterranean Sea to the English Channel and the North Sea, and from the Rhine to the Atlantic Ocean. It is bordered by Belgium, Luxembourg and Germany to the northeast, Switzerland and Italy to the east, and Andorra and Spain to the south. The overseas territories include French Guiana in South America and several islands in the Atlantic, Pacific and Indian oceans. The country's 18 integral regions span a combined area of 643,801 square kilometres (248,573 sq mi) and a total population of 67.02 million. France is a unitary semi-presidential republic with its capital in Paris, the country's largest city and main cultural and commercial centre. Other major urban areas include Lyon, Marseille, Toulouse, Bordeaux, Lille and Nice.

Germany Federal parliamentary republic in central-western Europe

Germany, officially the Federal Republic of Germany, is a country in Central and Western Europe, lying between the Baltic and North Seas to the north and the Alps, Lake Constance and the High Rhine to the south. It borders Denmark to the north, Poland and the Czech Republic to the east, Austria and Switzerland to the south, France to the southwest, and Luxembourg, Belgium and the Netherlands to the west.

Netherlands Constituent country of the Kingdom of the Netherlands in Europe

The Netherlands, sometimes incorrectly called Holland, is a country located in Northwestern Europe with some overseas territories in the Caribbean. In Europe, it consists of 12 provinces that border Germany to the east, Belgium to the south, and the North Sea to the northwest, with maritime borders in the North Sea with those countries and the United Kingdom. Together with three island territories in the Caribbean Sea—Bonaire, Sint Eustatius and Saba—it forms a constituent country of the Kingdom of the Netherlands. The official language is Dutch, but a secondary official language in the province of Friesland is West Frisian. In the northern parts of the country, Low German is also spoken.

Contents

Since the launch of the ITSEC in 1990, a number of other European countries have agreed to recognize the validity of ITSEC evaluations.

The ITSEC has been largely replaced by Common Criteria, which provides similarly-defined evaluation levels and implements the target of evaluation concept and the Security Target document.

The Common Criteria for Information Technology Security Evaluation is an international standard for computer security certification. It is currently in version 3.1 revision 5.

Concepts

The product or system being evaluated, called the target of evaluation, is subjected to a detailed examination of its security features culminating in comprehensive and informed functional and penetration testing. The degree of examination depends upon the level of confidence desired in the target. To provide different levels of confidence, the ITSEC defines evaluation levels, denoted E0 through E6. Higher evaluation levels involve more extensive examination and testing of the target.

Unlike earlier criteria, notably the TCSEC developed by the US defense establishment, the ITSEC did not require evaluated targets to contain specific technical features in order to achieve a particular assurance level. For example, an ITSEC target might provide authentication or integrity features without providing confidentiality or availability. A given target's security features were documented in a Security Target document, whose contents had to be evaluated and approved before the target itself was evaluated. Each ITSEC evaluation was based exclusively on verifying the security features identified in the Security Target.

United States Department of Defense United States federal executive department

The United States Department of Defense is an executive branch department of the federal government charged with coordinating and supervising all agencies and functions of the government directly related to national security and the United States Armed Forces. The DoD is the largest employer in the world, with nearly 1.3 million active-duty service members as of 2016. More employees include over 826,000 National Guard and Reservists from the armed forces, and over 732,000 civilians bringing the total to over 2.8 million employees. Headquartered at the Pentagon in Arlington, Virginia, just outside Washington, D.C., the DoD's stated mission is to provide "the military forces needed to deter war and ensure our nation's security".

Use

The formal Z notation was used to prove security properties about the Mondex smart card electronic cash system, allowing it to achieve ITSEC level E6, the highest granted security-level classification. [1] [2]

Z notation

The Z notation is a formal specification language used for describing and modelling computing systems. It is targeted at the clear specification of computer programs and computer-based systems in general.

Mondex

Mondex is a smart card electronic cash system, implemented as a stored-value card.

Related Research Articles

The Canadian Trusted Computer Product Evaluation Criteria (CTCPEC) is a computer security standard published in 1993 by the Communications Security Establishment to provide an evaluation criterion on IT products. It is a combination of the TCSEC and the European ITSEC approaches.

Inspection organized examination or formal evaluation exercise

An inspection is, most generally, an organized examination or formal evaluation exercise. In engineering activities inspection involves the measurements, tests, and gauges applied to certain characteristics in regard to an object or activity. The results are usually compared to specified requirements and standards for determining whether the item or activity is in line with these targets, often with a Standard Inspection Procedure in place to ensure consistent checking. Inspections are usually non-destructive.

In computer security, mandatory access control (MAC) refers to a type of access control by which the operating system constrains the ability of a subject or initiator to access or generally perform some sort of operation on an object or target. In practice, a subject is usually a process or thread; objects are constructs such as files, directories, TCP/UDP ports, shared memory segments, IO devices, etc. Subjects and objects each have a set of security attributes. Whenever a subject attempts to access an object, an authorization rule enforced by the operating system kernel examines these security attributes and decides whether the access can take place. Any operation by any subject on any object is tested against the set of authorization rules to determine if the operation is allowed. A database management system, in its access control mechanism, can also apply mandatory access control; in this case, the objects are tables, views, procedures, etc.

Multilevel security or multiple levels of security (MLS) is the application of a computer system to process information with incompatible classifications, permit access by users with different security clearances and needs-to-know, and prevent users from obtaining access to information for which they lack authorization. There are two contexts for the use of multilevel security. One is to refer to a system that is adequate to protect itself from subversion and has robust mechanisms to separate information domains, that is, trustworthy. Another context is to refer to an application of a computer that will require the computer to be strong enough to protect itself from subversion and possess adequate mechanisms to separate information domains, that is, a system we must trust. This distinction is important because systems that need to be trusted are not necessarily trustworthy.

The Evaluation Assurance Level of an IT product or system is a numerical grade assigned following the completion of a Common Criteria security evaluation, an international standard in effect since 1999. The increasing assurance levels reflect added assurance requirements that must be met to achieve Common Criteria certification. The intent of the higher levels is to provide higher confidence that the system's principal security features are reliably implemented. The EAL level does not measure the security of the system itself, it simply states at what level the system was tested.

A credential is an attestation of qualification, competence, or authority issued to an individual by a third party with a relevant or de facto authority or assumed competence to do so.

A trusted path or trusted channel is a mechanism that provides confidence that the user is communicating with what the user intended to communicate with, ensuring that attackers can't intercept or modify whatever information is being communicated.

Professor James Charles Paul Woodcock FREng FBCS CEng CITP is a British computer scientist.

Cybersecurity standards are techniques generally set forth in published materials that attempt to protect the cyber environment of a user or organization. This environment includes users themselves, networks, devices, all software, processes, information in storage or transit, applications, services, and systems that can be connected directly or indirectly to networks.

Solaris Trusted Extensions is a set of security extensions incorporated in the Solaris 10 operating system by Sun Microsystems, featuring a mandatory access control model. It succeeds Trusted Solaris, a family of security-evaluated operating systems based on earlier versions of Solaris.

A Protection Profile (PP) is a document used as part of the certification process according to ISO/IEC 15408 and the Common Criteria (CC). As the generic form of a Security Target (ST), it is typically created by a user or user community and provides an implementation independent specification of information assurance security requirements. A PP is a combination of threats, security objectives, assumptions, security functional requirements (SFRs), security assurance requirements (SARs) and rationales.

The Interactive Link is a suite of hardware and software products designed for application within areas where network separation is implemented for security reasons. Manufactured and marketed by Tenix Datagate, the Interactive Link hardware products have been evaluated to the highest level under international security criteria with a strong focus on maintaining the confidentiality of the secure network. The technology underlying the products is drawn from Starlight Technology, developed by the Australian Defence Science and Technology Group.

A separation kernel is a type of security kernel used to simulate a distributed environment. The concept was introduced by John Rushby in a 1981 paper. Rushby proposed the separation kernel as a solution to the difficulties and problems that had arisen in the development and verification of large, complex security kernels that were intended to "provide multilevel secure operation on general-purpose multi-user systems." According to Rushby, "the task of a separation kernel is to create an environment which is indistinguishable from that provided by a physically distributed system: it must appear as if each regime is a separate, isolated machine and that information can only flow from one machine to another along known external communication lines. One of the properties we must prove of a separation kernel, therefore, is that there are no channels for information flow between regimes other than those explicitly provided."

ISO/IEC 17024: Conformity assessment - General requirements for bodies operating certification of persons is an International Standard which specifies criteria for the operation of a Personnel Certification Body. The standard includes requirements for the development and maintenance of the certification scheme for persons upon which the certification is based.

Certification and accreditation is a process for implementing any formal process. It is a systematic procedure for evaluating, describing, testing, and authorizing systems or activities prior to or after a system is in operation. The process is used extensively across the world.

Trusted Computer System Evaluation Criteria DoD standard for computer security

Trusted Computer System Evaluation Criteria (TCSEC) is a United States Government Department of Defense (DoD) standard that sets basic requirements for assessing the effectiveness of computer security controls built into a computer system. The TCSEC was used to evaluate, classify, and select computer systems being considered for the processing, storage, and retrieval of sensitive or classified information.

IT risk management

IT risk management is the application of risk management methods to information technology in order to manage IT risk, i.e.:

A secure signature creation device is a specific type of computer hardware or software that is used in creating an electronic signature. To be put into service as a secure signature creation device (SSCD), the device must meet the rigorous requirements laid out under Annex II of Regulation (EU) No 910/2014 (eIDAS), where it is referred to as a qualified (electronic) signature creation device (QSCD). Using secure signature creation devices helps in facilitating online business processes that save time and money with transactions made within the public and private sectors.

References

  1. Susan Stepney, David Cooper, and Jim Woodcock, An Electronic Purse: Specification, Refinement, and Proof . Technical Monograph PRG-126, Programming Research Group, Oxford University, UK, 2000.
  2. Jim Woodcock, Susan Stepney, David Cooper, John Clark, and Jeremy Jacob, The certification of the Mondex electronic purse to ITSEC Level E6, Formal Aspects of Computing , Volume 20, Number 1, pages 5–19, January 2008.

Bibliography