Common Criteria

The Common Criteria (CC) is the most prestigious and rigorous international security evaluation standard available for IT products.

The CC was developed through a collaboration among national security and standards organisations within Canada, France, Germany, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom and the United States, as a common standard to replace their existing security evaluation criteria.

The national organisations have worked with the International Organisation for Standards (ISO) to ensure that the CC was suitable to become a formal standard and it has rapidly become the world standard and preferred method for security specifications and evaluations.

Certification to the Common Criteria requires an in-depth analysis of product design and development methodology backed up by extensive testing undertaken by an accredited 3rd party.

The CC structure allows flexibility in the specification of secure products and provides evaluation from a defined set of seven increasing levels of assurance, from EAL1 to EAL7.

All Senetas Security products are designed to the EAL4+ assurance level.

This means that:

• The low level design of the product has been extensively analysed to ensure it provides the stated security functionality
• The design has been independently tested for vulnerabilities.
• Product development controls are supported by:
• Life cycle model
• Automated configuration management
• Identification of all development tools
• A user can be confident that a product that's been evaluated by the CC to an EAL4+ assurance level will meet the stated security objectives and performance. It is the highest level that is economically feasible for a commercial security product.