CSA Preface

Standards development within the Information Technology sector is harmonized with international standards development. Through the CSA Technical Committee on Information Technology (TCIT), Canadians serve as the SCC Mirror Committee (SMC) on ISO/IEC Joint Technical Committee 1 on Information Technology (ISO/IEC JTC1) for the Standards Council of Canada (SCC), the ISO member body for Canada and sponsor of the Canadian National Committee of the IEC. Also, as a member of the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), Canada participates in the International Telegraph and Telephone Consultative Committee (ITU-T).

For brevity, this Standard will be referred to as "CAN/CSA-ISO/IEC 17960" throughout.

At the time of publication, ISO/IEC 17960:2015 is available from ISO and IEC in English only. CSA Group will publish the French version when it becomes available from ISO and IEC.

Scope

This International Standard specifies a language-neutral and environment-neutral description to define the methodology needed to support the signing of software source code, to enable it to be uniquely identified, and to enable roll-back to signed previous versions. It is intended to be used by originators of software source code and the recipients of their signed source code. This International Standard is designed for transfers of source code among disparate entities.

The following areas are outside the scope of this International Standard:

- Determination of the trust level of a certification authority;

- Format used to track revisions of source code files;

- Digital signing of object or binary code;

- System configuration and resource availability;

- Metadata

- This is partially addressed by ISO/IEC 19770-2;

- Transmission and representation issues

- Though this could be an issue in implementation, there are techniques such as Portable Document Format (PDF) that can be used to mitigate these issues. This applies in particular to the transmission of digital signatures.