National Information Assurance Partnership (NIAP)

Definition - What does National Information Assurance Partnership (NIAP) mean?

The National Information Assurance Partnership (NIAP) is a U.S. government initiative that looks at products in the information technology (IT) realm and ensures that they adhere to international standards. Adhering to standards is highly desirable in today’s technological world. NIAP was created as a partnership between the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the National Security Agency (NSA) to ensure that products related to technology are conforming to certain standards.

NIAP is also a Common Criteria Evaluation and Validation Scheme (CCEVS) validation body that is managed by the NSA. The purpose of the CCEVS is to create a national program for evaluating IT products against what is called the international common criteria for information technology security evaluation. There are also labs for IT product security testing.

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Techopedia explains National Information Assurance Partnership (NIAP)

The CCEVS is responsible for looking at security evaluations conducted by the Common Criteria Testing Laboratories (CCTLs), which are approved by CCEVS, and issuing common criteria certificates for those products. When an IT product receives the certificate and the validation report accompanying it, this indicates the product received an evaluation at a laboratory accredited using the common evaluation methodology to conform to the common criteria.

In addition, CCEVS keeps a list of all products that have received evaluations and validations in a validated products list. Therefore, if someone is interested in finding out whether a product has been evaluated and received a certificate, they could simply look on NIAP’s CCEVS website under the validated products list page.