Bid privacy and confidentiality

During the documentation upload process and until the bidder initiates the bid signature and submission mechanism, the documents shall reside solely and exclusively on the bidder's computer, where they cannot be accessed by the Administration or third parties.


When the bidder initiates bid signature and submission, the application downloads and executes an applet onto the bidder's computer. This program fragments and encodes the documents using the public keys of the members of the Procurement Desk, before proceeding to sign and submit them.


The sender shall only be informed of receipt following receipt of the entire bid.
Private keys are required from a minimum number of members of the Procurement Desk in order to reconstruct and make the documents legible. The application shall only allow access to the financial and technical tenders on the day and the hour foreseen for the public opening of proposals. Bidders may only access their own bids or those submitted by persons at their company; they may never access other bids.


The encryption technique is based on asymmetric keys using the Microsoft CAPICOM algorithm.
Fragmentation and reconstruction are based on the Shamir algorithm.

Security and Personal Data Protection

In order to guarantee the security of documents and the protection of personal data, data storage is included under the Basque Governments General Security, based on Public General Act 15/1999 for the Protection of Personal Data.

Recommendations to bidding companies

• Have up to date antivirus software.
  
  
• Use Acrobat (.pdf) type documents or similar. (It is estimated that such formats are, to date, less susceptible to viruses and the modification of their format and content).