Preface

Preface to TC/DRM Standards and Guidelines

The New Zealand Government Trusted Computing and Digital Rights Management (TC/DRM) Standards and Guidelines are a supplement to the TC/DRM Principles and Policies, published in 2006. The Principles and Policies seek to ensure that the use of trusted computing and digital rights management technologies do not adversely affect the integrity (including availability and confidentiality) of government-held information.

The Standards and Guidelines aim to:

• assist government agencies with the work of developing operational practice, appropriate for their own business drivers and statutory responsibilities, in response to the framework provided by the Principles and Policies
• provide vendors with guidance on what governments need from TC/DRM products, in order to be able to comply with the TC/DRM Principles and Policies.

The Standards and Guidelines were developed in 2006/07, by a working group of public and private sector officials.

Agencies must ensure that these Standards and Guidelines are integrated with their existing internal policies and standards, so that they are referred to at the applicable times in each agency’s business activities. To assist in this integration work, this document groups the Standards and Guidelines based on the activity each one relates to. Two of the groupings deal with government as a recipient of information potentially encumbered with DRM.

The third grouping, 'Applying DRM', deals with government as a generator of information potentially encumbered with DRM.

The fourth grouping deals with the end-to-end process that can lead to TC/DRM functionality being implemented in a government agency, beginning with planning and ending with deployment. The aim of these Standards and Guidelines is to ensure that agencies have adequate awareness of the potential TC/DRM Policy implications of decisions at each stage of the process, and take appropriate measures to comply.

The final grouping, 'Vendor Guidelines', is directed to vendors rather than agencies. It is intended to assist vendors in understanding the requirements of government and the issues raised by TC/DRM, and how these issues might be addressed by vendors. The term 'vendor' should be interpreted in the loosest sense, as being any provider of ICT technology (hardware, software, etc) or information product. The term should, therefore, be interpreted to include providers of free products, such as open source software.