Vietnam consults on technical standard for network intrusion prevention systems

Vietnam’s Ministry of Public Security has opened a public consultation on a proposed national standard for Network Intrusion Prevention Systems (NIPS), with comments accepted until 7 September 2026.

NIPS are security products designed to detect and prevent unauthorised activity targeting computer networks. The proposed standard would apply to organisations developing and deploying these systems for companies and government agencies.

The draft sets common technical requirements for how NIPS products should be managed and secured. These include system administration, remote administration, user authentication and authorisation, error handling, logging, documentation, and data backup and recovery.

It also defines requirements for detecting and responding to network threats. NIPS products would need to support common network protocols such as ICMP, TCP and UDP, analyse network traffic and packet information, identify applications and relevant context, and use traffic normalisation and other techniques to help prevent attackers from bypassing detection.

The proposed standard also covers the management and updating of security rules, as well as the use of indicators of compromise and threat intelligence. Systems would support both signature-based and anomaly-based detection and be capable of integrating with security platforms such as Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) and Security Orchestration, Automation and Response (SOAR).

Additional requirements address how systems respond when threats are detected, including generating alerts and controlling or blocking network traffic. The draft also establishes requirements for processing capacity, fault tolerance, redundancy and availability, including Active-Active and Active-Passive deployment models.

The standard would also include virtual patching, which allows security controls to mitigate known vulnerabilities when a software update cannot immediately be applied. The proposed requirements would map these mechanisms to commonly identified security vulnerabilities.

The consultation gives organisations and other stakeholders an opportunity to comment on the technical requirements before the proposed standard is finalised.