If you have come across a requirement for product compliance with FIPS 140-2, Security Requirements for Cryptographic Modules, you may have wondered about FIPS and its applicability to information technology products.
FIPS is the acronym for Federal Information Processing Standards. FIPS was established in the 1960s to provide uniform guidelines or specifications for processes, data interchange, and functionality within the Federal government’s early information technology departments. Currently FIPS are maintained by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). In general, FIPS are developed and issued when there are no industry standards available for citation in requirements and/or procurement documents.
In the early days of IT automation there were no accepted standards for widely used data such as dates, for example. Without a standard, persons programming a database were free to use whatever format they might choose, which resulted in an inability to share or merge data from one system to that produced by another. When the American National Standards Institute (ANSI), a private not-for-profit organization with over 100,000 government and private corporate members, established the Date standard as YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM:SS, the FIPS document for a standard date format was retired.
Other early FIPS Publications, since withdrawn because the technology is no longer used or an industry standard has been agreed upon, included guidelines for punch cards used by mainframe programmers, flowchart symbols for use in data modeling, software language standards for COBOL and ADA, OCR character sets, Standardized Generalized Markup Language (SGML), and hardware products including modems and fax machines. In some cases FIPS were superseded by ANSI standards, in other cases by international standards developed by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO).
Certain FIPS publications have been superseded by a related publication in the NIST Special Publication 800 series. For example the standard reference for many years for organizational codes for the Federal government, FIPS 95-2 was superseded a few years ago by NIST Special Publication 800-87. This document provides a complete breakdown of the Federal Government hierarchy and budgeting structure.
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