In the beginning there was DoD

In December of 1985 U.S. Department of Defence standardised its Trusted Computer System Evaluation Criteria (TCSEC) for use in its Command, Control, Communications and Intelligence applications. While computer systems that meet TCSEC have existed proir to adoption of this standard, its adoption, nonetheless, marks the beginning of systematic evaluation of security systems in history of computers.

In early 1990s, several European nations follow suite with their standard called ITSEC and Canada comes up with CTCPEC.

The Common Criteria Standard

A few years later, these three are eventually combined together as an ISO standard 15408 also known as Common Criteria which is recognized by several countries.

FIPS 140-1

Starting in March 2000, Federal Information Processing Standards Publication 140 version 2 (FIPS 140-2) became the current standard for specific cryptographic applications.

References and Acknowledgements

1. The Wikipedia web encyclopedia was very helpful in verifying the dates of events in the chronology of Trusted Computing.
2. The rainbow series library hosted by NCSC's Trust Technology Assessment Program