Objective Requirements

16 January 2024

Objective Requirements are a type of optional requirement that is not recognized by the Common Criteria, but is used by NIAP to indicate that a requirement is expected to become a mandatory requirement in the future. So it is essentially a heads-up to developers.

See the below references for details on how to specify Objective Requirements in a document.

Objective Requirements specified in a Protection Profile or Functional Package automatically appear in Appendix A.2 of the document.

The same is true for Objective Requirements defined in the main body of a PP-Module. Objective Requirements should not appear in the Additional SFRs section under a Base PP, but if one did, it would appear in the same Additional SFRs section with a header indicating that the SFR is objective.

For more on Optional and Implementation-dependent Requirements, see

• Optional, Objective, and Implementation‐Dependent SFRs, and
• Classifying SFRs as Mandatory, Selection‐based, etc.