The Government Digital Service has updated its guidelines to mandate that services run on secure HTTPS and use HTTP Strict Transport Security by 1 October 2016.

GDS has imposed higher security measures for services and emails – Photo credit: Flickr, Jobs for Felons Hub

The security guidelines for government services were first established in 2012, and have now been updated to set out stricter security measures for services and emails.

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All government services must run on secure systems – HTTPS – so that all data is encrypted while users are using the service.

In addition they must use HSTS. This tells browsers that a service will only use secure connections and that information should be encrypted.

The service.gov.uk domain will only ever connect to government services via HTTPS from September, meaning that services that are only available over unsecured connections will stop working in modern browsers.

Alongside the updates to services, GDS has published guidance on how to implement secure email practices.

This includes an update to its DMARC – Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting and Conformance – policy.

Any emails that do not have a DMARC policy set to the highest level, known as p=reject, by 1 October may have their emails rejected by external email providers, GDS said in a blogpost.

It said that, as a temporary measure, if teams can’t change their policy to p=reject, they should publish a record using p=none to override the default policy.