This document establishes the general concepts and principles of IT security evaluation and specifies the general model of evaluation given by various parts of the standard which in its entirety is meant to be used as the basis for evaluation of security properties of IT products.

This document provides an overview of all parts of the ISO/IEC 15408 series. It describes the various parts of the ISO/IEC 15408 series; defines the terms and abbreviations to be used in all parts of the standard; establishes the core concept of a Target of Evaluation (TOE); describes the evaluation context and describes the audience to which the evaluation criteria is addressed. An introduction to the basic security concepts necessary for evaluation of IT products is given.

This document introduces:

—    the key concepts of Protection Profiles (PP), PP-Modules, PP-Configurations, packages, Security Targets (ST), and conformance types;

—    a description of the organization of security components throughout the model;

—    the various operations by which the functional and assurance components given in ISO/IEC 15408‑2 and ISO/IEC 15408‑3 can be tailored through the use of permitted operations;

—    general information about the evaluation methods given in ISO/IEC 18045;

—    guidance for the application of ISO/IEC 15408‑4 in order to develop evaluation methods (EM) and evaluation activities (EA) derived from ISO/IEC 18045;

—    general information about the pre-defined Evaluation Assurance Levels (EALs) defined in ISO/IEC 15408‑5;

—    information in regard to the scope of evaluation schemes.