NIST

Expanded name

National Institute of Standards and Technology

Date of establishment

1901 (as National Bureau of Standards)

URL

http://www.itl.nist.gov/ [external]

Objectives

The National Institute of Standards and Technology, an agency of the U.S. Department of Commerce's Technology Administration, was established by Congress "to assist industry in the development of technology needed to improve product quality, to modernize manufacturing processes, to ensure product reliability and to facilitate rapid commercialization of products based on new scientific discoveries".

Areas of Activity

The Information Technology programme within the wide coverage of NIST is involved in projects in the following areas:

• Advanced Networking Technologies [external]
• Computer Security [external]
• Convergent Information Systems [external]
• Information Access and User Interfaces [external]
• Information Services and Computing [external]
• Math, Statistics and Computational Science [external]
• Software Diagnostics and Conformance Testing [external]

Membership

No membership; US government agency.

Standards Sponsored

FIPS 186: Digital Signature Standard

FIPS 186: Digital Signature Standard (DSS)