How Zero Trust Data Format (ZTDF) is Revolutionizing the Interoperability Required for Secure Mission Partner Sharing
Historically, secure communication across allied nations has been hindered by disparate standards and manual tagging processes. The challenge: each nation and its respective defense agencies have their own data classification and security standards and protocols, making interoperability between allies a constant struggle. The different standards make it difficult to exchange information with the right audience at the right speed across different systems, hindering the ability to make real-time battlefield decisions. The Zero Trust Data Format (ZTDF) was designed to address these issues by creating an interoperable security wrapper to facilitate secure, real-time data sharing among mission partners.
What is ZTDF?
Building on the foundational standards of STANAG 4774 and 4778, NATO has evolved toward a comprehensive Data-Centric Security (DCS) approach that prioritizes protecting the information itself instead of securing network perimeters. The Zero Trust Data Format (ZTDF) is the first interoperable data security wrapper that integrates traditional STANAGs with modern zero-trust principles. It was adopted in 2025 and ratified through NATO’s Combined Communications-Electronics Board.
ZTDF facilitates seamless data sharing among allied nations by securely embedding data-centric access controls and classification metadata directly into documents. This allows for automatic translation between different national classification systems while maintaining cryptographic integrity throughout the data lifecycle.
How does ZTDF align with Zero Trust principles?
Zero Trust has shifted the global defense cybersecurity posture from implicit perimeter trust to continuous verification of users, devices, and resources. ZTDF takes that logic to the data layer by encapsulating encryption, the access policy, classification, and tamper evidence inside the object, ensuring these protections travel with the file wherever it goes.
ZTDF provides an open, extensible specification that turns a traditional payload into a cryptographically secured, policy-carrying object using strong algorithms and attribute-based access control (ABAC).
This is the essence of data-centric security as outlined in the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Zero Trust Model (NIST SP 800-207). It is also an essential step to reduce the blast radius when networks and tenants are shared among allies.
How does ZTDF solve interoperability challenges?
Allied operations rely on transferring sensitive information across national boundaries and maintaining classification schemes without duplicating content or compromising control. However, the disparate standards and manual tagging processes have made this task difficult.
ZTDF was specifically created to solve this problem. ZTDF is an interoperable security wrapper that bridges US Intel Community and DoD practices with NATO standards and agreed-upon five-nation CCEB processes, allowing access and security policies to be expressed and enforced consistently across mission partners. It creates the building blocks needed for object-level policy, labelling, and metadata binding that enable the transfer of standardized security policies bound to the data, ensuring it is protected no matter where it travels.
This also aligns with the broader view that Zero Trust is not a set of isolated pillars but a fabric that weaves identity, device posture, and data controls together, so each request is verified at the object itself. It provides a method to enforce the principles of least privilege and ‘need to know’ that are critical for securing sensitive information in multinational environments.
How does ZTDF overlap the Data Lifecycle?
The challenge of incorporating any zero trust model on organizational data is maintaining a classification model that can keep up with the rate of generation and change, or the velocity of the data. By addressing each data point as an independently encrypted element, as soon as a document is generated, it becomes classified and encrypted. Access enforcement becomes a function of attributes: nationality, clearance level, security group or need to know. Combined with access policies, which provide the rubric for who or what is even aware of the data’s existence.
ZTDF provides the basis for protecting data throughout its lifecycle, ensuring that only those who have the appropriate attributes can access the data. However, organizations can use ATDF and policy to create even more granular control mechanisms, such as enforcing read-only rights or inspecting network packets for host IP to ensure the data is being accessed from within a nation’s sovereign borders.
ZTDF Use Cases
Cross-Domain Data Sharing
Governments and defense contractors need to exchange mission data between authorized partners while preventing accidental or intentional data loss across disparate classification networks and unique access control and encryption infrastructure.
Data-Centric Protection at the edge
Deployments at the edge nodes and commercial cloud services for field operations. Data moves between disconnected edge devices, tactical clouds, and enterprise analytics systems.
Controlled release of Sensitive Intellectual Property
A defense manufacturer collaborates with multiple subcontractors and government agencies on a new platform design. Drawings, simulation files and material specs must be shared securely, but only specific parties should view or modify certain parts.
Enhancing Mission Partner Collaboration
ZTDF enables secure collaboration and data sharing, allowing files, messages, and documents to be exchanged across borders and classifications. It integrates encryption, labels, and access policies directly into objects (files, messages and documents), ensuring that security measures remain effective across different clouds, networks, and countries. This approach enables defense organizations and mission partners to reduce risk while simultaneously enhancing operational efficiency.
To learn more about implementing ZTDF, contact us.
