Rob Joyce, White House cybersecurity coordinator, has said the federal government should work to ensure the transparency of the Vulnerabilities Equities Process in order for U.S. citizens to have confidence in VEP’s integrity.

Joyce wrote in a blog post posted Wednesday VEP is an interagency process that seeks to determine whether to divulge cyber vulnerability data to vendors to facilitate patches or temporarily restrict that data in support of law enforcement and national security operations.

The newly released VEP Charter covers four groups of equity considerations designed to help decision makers assess the potential advantages and risks to national security of limiting or disclosing vulnerability data.

Those equity considerations include defensive equities; commercial equities; international partnership equities; and intelligence, law enforcement and operational equities.

Joyce noted that the public release of the VEP Charter aims to provide information on participants in the Equities Review Board, vulnerability categories that go through the process and federal agencies and departments that take part in VEP discussions.

The charter would also require the release of an annual report to offer information on VEP metrics and notify the public about the process and related outcomes.

The Trump administration is slated to release its rules for determining whether newly-discovered cybersecurity vulnerabilities should be disclosed or kept secret, Reuters reported Wednesday.

An anonymous national security official told Reuters that the guidelines are expected to be published Wednesday on the White House website.

The source added that the new rules will identify federal agencies involved in the decision-making process and will include more agencies than in the previous review process under the Obama administration, such as the departments of Commerce, Treasury and State.

Rob Joyce, the White House cybersecurity coordinator, said at a Washington Post event last month that the guidelines will include criteria used by an interagency panel and will also reveal the panel members.

NASA is set to conduct technology demonstration missions for two Cubesats that took off Sunday aboard Orbital ATK’s Cygnus spacecraft.

The agency said Tuesday it will conduct the Optical Communications and Sensor Demonstration and Integrated Solar Array and Reflectarray Antenna missions as part of the Small Spacecraft Technology Program.

“Our primary mission for OCSD is demonstrating laser communications, by using a laser on the spacecraft to downlink data to our optical ground stations on Mt. Wilson in California,” said Richard Welle, one of the principal investigators of the OCSD mission at The Aerospace Corp.

OCSD also seeks to evaluate the capability of small satellites for proximity operations.

The ISARA mission is designed to advance higher data downlink communications through the use of the Ka-band frequency and Cubesats equipped with solar cells and reflectarray antenna.

NASA will work with The Aerospace Corp. to conduct the ISARA mission, which seeks to facilitate the transmission of reflectarray antenna-derived signals to a ground station at the agency’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California and the evaluation of the mission’s downlink transmission.

Cygnus lifted off Sunday aboard an Antares rocket from NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia to deliver cargo to the International Space Station as part of the company’s eighth Commercial Resupply Services mission.

Cygnus will deploy the two Cubesats into a higher orbit to initiate the OCSD and ISARA missions once the spacecraft departs the orbiting laboratory.