The National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) has published an alpha version of guidance to assess the security of voice, video and messaging services.
It said the secure communication principles are particularly relevant to the public sector, designed to help organisations make decisions when selecting products and service for secure communications, and are aimed at helping them find the right balance of functionality, security and privacy.
They are divided into seven sections: protecting data in transit; protecting network nodes with access to sensitive data; protecting user access to a service; ensuring secure audit of communications; allowing administrators to securely manage users and systems; using metadata only for its necessary purpose; and assessing the supply chain for trust and resilience.
Guidance in each section is conveyed through a series of questions reflecting different types of threat to cyber security.
NCSC said it is looking for feedback through a GitHub page on the principles, especially from vendors and organisations that would use the products.
