en.Wedoany.com Reported - The Administrative Approval and Government Affairs Information Management Bureau of Henan Province officially issued the "Security Management Guide for the Development of Non-Classified Government Affairs Information Systems" on April 3, 2026, and released a policy interpretation to the public on May 6. The Guide comprises 6 chapters and 29 articles, embedding security controls throughout the entire process of planning, design, development, testing, and launch of non-classified government affairs information systems, thereby establishing a security management system covering the entire system construction lifecycle.
The introduction of the Guide is a direct response to the continuously escalating security risks in digital government. As the interconnection of government affairs information systems advances and the degree of data aggregation increases, a breach in system security directly threatens government operations, citizen privacy, and even national security. Based on in-depth research and multiple rounds of discussion, Henan Province has transformed the principled national-level systems concerning cybersecurity, data security, and cryptography application into specific, operational, and implementable norms, closing the long-underestimated hidden risk entry point of inadequate security controls during the development phase.
The core principle of the Guide requires "synchronous planning, synchronous design, synchronous construction, synchronous acceptance, and synchronous use." This means security protection must be advanced simultaneously with system development, rather than supplementing security measures after the system is launched. The Guide explicitly prohibits government affairs information systems that have not undergone security testing or do not meet security requirements from "operating with deficiencies," and systems involving work secrets must also comply with relevant confidentiality management regulations.
The construction of a responsibility system is another core highlight. Following the principle of "whoever constructs is responsible, whoever participates is responsible," the Guide details the development security management responsibilities for three core entities: construction units, design units, and contracting units, building a synergistic and efficient security responsibility system for government affairs information system development. The construction unit bears the primary responsibility for the network and data security of the government affairs information system, while the design and contracting units bear their respective security responsibilities.
Security requirements during the planning and design phase are systematically detailed in the Guide. Construction units need to coordinate development security supervision, liaise with multiple departments including cryptography, confidentiality, cyberspace affairs, and public security, ensuring the synchronous implementation of requirements for graded protection, cryptography, and data security. Regarding graded protection for cybersecurity, the security protection level must be determined based on relevant grading guidelines, protective measures planned according to corresponding basic requirements, and filed for record. For cryptography application, clear compliance protection requirements must be proposed, and the commercial cryptography application plan must pass a security assessment before it can serve as the basis for construction.
Data protection, identity management, and log management constitute the three lines of defense for daily security governance. The Guide requires data classification and grading, establishing a security protection system covering the entire data lifecycle. For identity management, the use of real production data or weak passwords is prohibited in development and testing environments. For log management, systems must possess automatic log collection capabilities, covering all user operations and system operational statuses, with log retention periods of no less than six months.
Security actions during the testing and launch phases are also clearly defined one by one. Before launch, a third-party institution must be commissioned to conduct security testing, detecting application security flaws, software supply chain security risks, and insecure configurations. Simultaneously, commercial cryptography application security assessments and graded cybersecurity protection evaluations must be completed; critical information infrastructure must also pass security testing and evaluation. During launch, deployer permissions must be controlled, and versions strictly managed to ensure the deployment environment is consistent with the actual operating environment, preventing unauthorized changes.
From the perspective of policy evolution, the Guide was open for public comments at the end of November 2025 and was formally issued after nearly five months of revision and refinement. This indicates that Henan Province has moved from macro-level guidance to a phase of refined operational norms in the field of government affairs information system security governance. By mapping the abstract provisions of multiple superior laws and regulations—such as the Cybersecurity Law of the People's Republic of China, the Data Security Law of the People's Republic of China, the Personal Information Protection Law of the People's Republic of China, the Regulations on the Security Protection of Critical Information Infrastructure, and the Regulations on the Security Management of Internet-based Government Affairs Applications—into specific security check items and responsibility attributions, the Guide lowers the security compliance threshold for frontline construction units and provides a comparable assessment basis for third-party security testing and evaluation institutions.
The release of the Guide coincides with China's digital government construction entering a period of deep integration. County-level and municipal government affairs systems are accelerating their migration to provincial cloud platforms, and the scale of API calls and data exchanges between systems continues to expand, rapidly broadening the security risk surface. Henan Province has taken the lead in making institutionalized arrangements for the entire process of government affairs information system development security in the form of provincial-level normative documents, addressing the long-standing structural deficiencies in the field of government affairs information system security, which previously emphasized "construction over security" and "operation and maintenance over development."
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