Federal Information Processing Standards

Federal Information Processing Standard (FIPS) is the name given to publicly announced standards of the United States. These were laid down by the U.S. federal government and used by all civilian government institutions in the United States and their authorized suppliers. These standards are based on modification of the standards commonly used, which are established by ANSI, IEEE, ISO, and similar organizations, some of these standards have been developed by the government, such as the key codes for states, regions and other entities or standards for data encryption, as such as the Data Encryption Standard (FIPS 46 ), or the Advanced Encryption Standard (FIPS 197).

In the field of cryptography also FIPS these two are known:

  • FIPS 140-2 Security Requirements for Cryptographic Modules (FIPS 140-2 certification of OpenSSL in 2006)
  • FIPS 186-3 standard for digital signatures ( FIPS Digital Signature Algorithm and RSA cryptosystem )

FIPS are regularly made in the technical delivery of all government organizations in the United States on the basis of tenders. Thus they influence the information technology considerably, because the manufacturers are trying their products to meet these standards in order to win public sector contracts.

More FIPS examples are:

  • FIPS country codes and region codes (FIPS 10-4)
  • FIPS place codes (FIPS 55-3 )
  • FIPS Countycodes (FIPS 6-4)
  • FIPS state codes (FIPS 5-2)

These are similar to the nomenclature of ISO 3166, or the NUTS of the European Union.

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