The Trusted Data Format (TDF) is a data object encoding specification for the purposes of enabling data tagging and cryptographic security features. These features include assertion of data properties or tags, cryptographic binding and

data encryption In cryptography, encryption (more specifically, encoding) is the process of transforming information in a way that, ideally, only authorized parties can decode. This process converts the original representation of the information, known as plai ...

. The TDF is freely available with no restrictions and requires no use of proprietary or patented technology and is thus open for anyone to use.

Overview

The TDF Specification is based on a Trusted Data Object (TDO) which can be grouped together into a Trusted Data Collection (TDC). Each TDO consists of a data payload which can be associated with an unlimited number of metadata objects. The TDO supports the cryptographic binding of the metadata objects to the payload data object. In addition, both data and metadata objects can be associated with a block of encryption information which is used by any TDF consumer to decrypt the associated data or metadata if it had been encrypted. A TDC allows for additional metadata objects to apply to a set of TDOs.

Implementations

The

United States Intelligence Community The United States Intelligence Community (IC) is a group of separate US federal government, U.S. federal government intelligence agencies and subordinate organizations that work to conduct Intelligence assessment, intelligence activities which ...

maintains the IC-TDF, which includes government-specific tagging requirements on top of the core TDF capabilities mentioned above, in an XML Data Encoding Specification. The

United States Department of Defense The United States Department of Defense (DoD, USDOD, or DOD) is an United States federal executive departments, executive department of the federal government of the United States, U.S. federal government charged with coordinating and superv ...

uses TDF to implement the

Department of Defense Discovery Metadata Specification {{Redirect, DDMS, the Android debugger named Dalvik Debug Monitor Server, Dalvik (software) The Department of Defense Discovery Metadata Specification (DoD Discovery Metadata Specification or DDMS) is a Net-Centric Enterprise Services (NCES) meta ...

(DDMS).

References

External links

US Office of the Director of National Intelligence website on the TDF Specification
Cryptography standards XML-based standards {{compu-storage-stub