Design Data Control for Aerospace and Defense

For most engineering organizations, controlling access to design data is an important security practice. In aerospace and defense, however, access to sensitive integrated circuit design data can carry legal, contractual, and operational consequences under United States export control and defense acquisition requirements. Effective compliance therefore depends not only on documented policies, but on whether the systems holding controlled data can enforce and demonstrate those policies in practice.

This whitepaper examines what U.S. export control and defense acquisition policy means for the systems used to manage integrated circuit design data, the architectural capabilities those obligations demand, and how SOS Enterprise supports their implementation. It is intended for program security and export control leads responsible for demonstrating effective controls, design data and CAD managers responsible for operating them, and engineering leaders accountable for managing program risk.

The paper outlines practical steps organizations can take to assess their current position, including identifying uncontrolled copies of design data and testing whether access can be reliably removed. It then explores how program boundaries can be represented through explicit project membership, how release markings can move from document headers into structured and enforceable attributes, and how access requests can be managed through recorded approval workflows.

SOS Enterprise supports these controls through integrated design data management, IP lifecycle management, and governance capabilities. Project-specific membership, roles, and approval rules help establish program separation, while server-enforced attribute-level permissions provide granular control over sensitive information. Recorded approval tasks preserve the request, approver, and outcome, creating evidence of access decisions. Link-based working areas can also reduce unnecessary data duplication, decreasing the volume of controlled information that organizations must manage and protect.

By reducing uncontrolled copies, enforcing permissions at the data layer, and maintaining records of access decisions, SOS Enterprise helps organizations translate export control policies into operational, auditable controls—and demonstrate how those controls function throughout the design data lifecycle.