This part of ISO/IEC 15408 establishes the general concepts and principles of IT security evaluation and specifies the general model of evaluation given by various parts of the International Standard which in its entirety is meant to be used as the basis for evaluation of security properties of IT products.

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

It defines the various operations by which the functional and assurance components given in ISO/IEC 15408-2 and ISO/IEC 15408-3 may be tailored through the use of permitted operations.

The key concepts of protection profiles (PP), packages of security requirements and the topic of conformance are specified and the consequences of evaluation and evaluation results are described. This part of ISO/IEC 15408 gives guidelines for the specification of Security Targets (ST) and provides a description of the organization of components throughout the model. General information about the evaluation methodology is given in ISO/IEC 18045 and the scope of evaluation schemes is provided.