Evaluation, Assurance and Postal Approval

Abstract

Before a computerized system is applied to the real world, for example by representing real money by bits and bytes, the stakeholders demand to convince themselves of the security and reliability of the system. This is called system security assurance. It is achieved by good and bad case testing and evaluating the actual system at hand over an extended period of time by a team of experts knowledgeable of the system. A full scale business of system security assurance consulting has been developed since the early 1990’s, when the orange book was retired and overcome by a more flexible assurance methodology called the Common Criteria [41]. For e-postage systems, the postal operators are the primary stakeholders, so they have established a mandatory postal approval process that any e-postage provider’s system must pass before his system is allowed to be operated in the respective postal market. Major updates and bug fixes of an e-postage system are usually required to be approved by the respective postal operator, in particular if they might affect the financial integrity of the whole or a part of the e-postage system.

Keywords

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