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Information Technology Security Evaluation Manual

Background

In May 1990 France, Germany, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom published the Information Technology Security Evaluation Criteria [ITSEC] based on existing national work in their respective countries. After widespread international review the ITSEC has been developed in two further versions of which the current version 1.2 is the basis for this document.

An important reason for wishing to produce these international harmonised criteria was that such harmonisation is one of the prerequisites of international mutual recognition of the certificates which summarise the results of Information Technology (IT) security evaluations and confirm that the evaluations have been properly carried out. It is also a prerequisite of mutual recognition that the methods used to apply these harmonised criteria should themselves be harmonised. On completion of the ITSEC therefore, the four countries continued to co-operate, with the aim of agreeing a common approach to the conduct of IT security evaluations, at least to the extent necessary to provide the required confidence to facilitate mutual recognition.

Much work had already been done and some of this published on the development of IT security evaluation methods. In the UK this included CESG Memorandum Number 2 [CESG2], developed for government use, and the "Green Books" series of the Department of Trade and Industry, including V23-Evaluation and Certification Manual [DTI23], for commercial IT security products. In Germany, the German Information Security Agency published their IT Evaluation Manual [GISA1].

The basic approach was to harmonise existing security evaluation methods in each of the four countries to the extent necessary to ensure that national evaluation methods conform to a single philosophy. It was initially felt that the work should be limited to harmonisation of existing methods. However, it has been necessary to extend the existing work and to develop some new ideas in order to achieve these objectives.

General Scope

This IT Security Evaluation Manual (ITSEM) builds on the ITSEC Version 1.2, describing how a Target Of Evaluation (TOE) should be evaluated according to these criteria. The specific objective of the ITSEM is to ensure that there exists a harmonised set of evaluation methods which complements the ITSEC

The ITSEM is a technical document, aimed predominantly at partners in evaluation (primarily evaluators but also sponsors and certifiers), but it is also of interest to vendors, developers, system accreditors and users. It contains sufficient detail of evaluation methods and procedures to enable technical equivalence of evaluations performed in different environments to be demonstrated. The document will be freely available. The ITSEM will apply to evaluations carried out both in commercial and government sectors.

For the purposes of mutual recognition it is necessary that some parts of the ITSEM be prescriptive on evaluators. However most of the ITSEM is descriptive or intended to provide guidance.

In order to put the evaluation methods prescribed and described into a context, it is necessary to include in the ITSEM some outline information on certification and how it may be organised.

This document stresses the importance of independence of evaluation from any commercial pressures from a sponsor or developer of a TOE. However first party evaluation, in the sense of evaluation performed by another part of the sponsoring or developing organisation, is not precluded provided that the requirements of the national scheme are fulfilled.

The ITSEM has been written from the perspective that certification follows the evaluation. The case that an evaluation is followed by a supplier's declaration is outside the scope of this document although, even in this case, use of the ITSEM may still be helpful.

Download ITSEM (1,743KB zip file)

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