By Sally Long, Director of The Open Group Trusted Technology Forum (OTTF)™
In April 2013, The Open Group announced the release of the Open Trusted Technology Provider™ Standard (O-TTPS) 1.0 – Mitigating Maliciously Tainted and Counterfeit Products. Now we are announcing the O-TTPS Accreditation Program, launched on February 3, 2014, which enables organizations that conform to the standard to be accredited as Open Trusted Technology Providers™.
The O-TTPS, a standard of The Open Group, provides a set of guidelines, recommendations and requirements that help assure against maliciously tainted and counterfeit products throughout commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) information and communication technology (ICT) product lifecycles. The standard includes best practices throughout all phases of a product’s life cycle: design, sourcing, build, fulfillment, distribution, sustainment, and disposal, thus enhancing the integrity of COTS ICT products and the security of their global supply chains.
This accreditation program is one of the first of its kind in providing accreditation for conforming to standards for product integrity coupled with supply chain security.
The standard and the accreditation program are the result of a collaboration between government, third party evaluators and some of industry’s most mature and respected providers who came together and, over a period of four years, shared their practices for integrity and security, including those used in-house and those used with their own supply chains.
Applying for O-TTPS Accreditation
When the OTTF started this initiative, one of its many mantras was “raise all boats.” The objective was to raise the security bar across the full spectrum of the supply chain, from small component suppliers to the providers who include those components in their products and to the integrators who incorporate those providers’ products into customers’ systems.
The O-TTPS Accreditation Program is open to all component suppliers, providers and integrators. The holistic aspect of this program’s potential, as illustrated in the diagram below should not be underestimated—but it will take a concerted effort to reach and encourage all constituents in the supply chain to become involved.
The importance of mitigating the risk of maliciously tainted and counterfeit products
The focus on mitigating the risks of tainted and counterfeit products by increasing the security of the supply chain is critical in today’s global economy. Virtually nothing is made from one source.
COTS ICT supply chains are complex. A single product can be comprised of hundreds of components from multiple component suppliers from numerous different areas around the world—and providers can change their component suppliers frequently depending on the going rate for a particular component. If, along the supply chain, bad things happen, such as inserting counterfeit components in place of authentic ones or inserting maliciously tainted code or the double-hammer—maliciously tainted counterfeit parts—then terrible things can happen when that product is installed at a customer site.
With the threat of tainted and counterfeit technology products posing a major risk to global organizations, it is increasingly important for those organizations to take what steps they can to mitigate these risks. The O-TTPS Accreditation Program is one of those steps. Can an accreditation program completely eliminate the risk of tainted and counterfeit components? No! Does it reduce the risk? Absolutely!
How the Accreditation Program works
The Open Group, with over 25 years’ experience managing vendor- and technology-neutral certification programs, will assume the role of the Accreditation Authority over the entire program. Additionally the program will utilize third-party assessors to assess conformance to the O-TTPS requirements.
Companies seeking accreditation will declare their Scope of Accreditation, which means they can choose to be accredited for conforming to the O-TTPS standard and adhering to the best practice requirements across their entire enterprise, within a specific product line or business unit or within an individual product. Organizations applying for accreditation are then required to provide evidence of conformance for each of the O-TTPS requirements, demonstrating they have the processes in place to secure in-house development and their supply chains across the entire COTS ICT product lifecycle. O-TTPS accredited organizations will then be able to identify themselves as Open Trusted Technology Providers™ and will become part of a public registry of trusted providers.
The Open Group has also instituted the O-TTPS Recognized Assessor Program, which assures that Recognized Assessor (companies) meet certain criteria as assessor organizations and that their assessors (individuals) meet an additional set of criteria and have passed the O-TTPS Assessor exam, before they can be assigned to an O-TTPS Assessment. The Open Group will operate this program, grant O-TTPS Recognized Assessor certificates and list those qualifying organizations on a public registry of recognized assessor companies.
Efforts to increase awareness of the program
The Open Group understands that to achieve global uptake we need to reach out to other countries across the globe for market adoption, as well as to other standards groups for harmonization. The forum has a very active outreach and harmonization work group and the OTTF is increasingly being recognized for its efforts. A number of prominent U.S. government agencies, including the General Accounting Office and NASA have recognized the standard as an important supply chain security effort. Dave Lounsbury, the CTO of The Open Group, has testified before Congress on the value of this initiative from the industry-government partnership perspective. The Open Group has also met with President Obama’s Cybersecurity Coordinators (past and present) to apprise them of our work. We continue to work closely with NIST from the perspective of the Cybersecurity Framework, which recognizes the supply chain as a critical area for the next version, and the OTTF work is acknowledged in NIST’s Special Publication 161. We have liaisons with ISO and are working internally at mapping our standards and accreditation to Common Criteria. The O-TTPS has also been discussed with government agencies in China, India, Japan and the UK.
The initial version of the standard and the accreditation program are just the beginning. OTTF members will continue to evolve both the standard and the accreditation program to provide additional versions that refine existing requirements, introduce additional requirements, and cover additional threats. And the outreach and harmonization efforts will continue to strengthen so that we can reach that holistic potential of Open Trusted Technology Providers™ throughout all global supply chains.
For more details on the O-TTPS accreditation program, to apply for accreditation, or to learn more about becoming an O-TTPS Recognized Assessor visit the O-TTPS Accreditation page.
For more information on The Open Group Trusted Technology Forum please visit the OTTF Home Page.
The O-TTPS standard and the O-TTPS Accreditation Policy they are freely available from the Trusted Technology Section in The Open Group Bookstore.
For information on joining the OTTF membership please contact Mike Hickey – m.hickey@opengroup.org
Sally Long is the Director of The Open Group Trusted Technology Forum (OTTF). She has managed customer supplier forums and collaborative development projects for over twenty years. She was the release engineering section manager for all multi-vendor collaborative technology development projects at The Open Software Foundation (OSF) in Cambridge Massachusetts. Following the merger of the OSF and X/Open under The Open Group, she served as director for multiple forums in The Open Group. Sally has a Bachelor of Science degree in Electrical Engineering from Northeastern University in Boston, Massachusetts.