Many U.S. Government information technology systems need to employ strong cryptographic schemes to protect the integrity and confidentiality of the data they process. These algorithms have been standardized to facilitate interoperability between systems. However, the use of these algorithms requires the establishment of secret keying material that is shared in advance. Trusted couriers may manually distribute this secret keying material, but as the number of entities using a system grows, the work involved in the distribution of the secret keying material grows rapidly.

Special Publication (SP) 800-56B, Recommendation for Pair-Wise Key-Establishment Using Integer Factorization Cryptography, specifies key-agreement and key-transport schemes that are based on the RSA algorithm.  NIST seeks comments on Draft SP 800-56B Revision 2. Significant changes to the document are listed in "Notes to Reviewers” on page iii. A more detailed list of changes is provided in the final appendix.

Comments on Draft SP 800-56B Rev. 2 are requested by Friday, October 5, 2018; they should be submitted to SP800-56b_comments@nist.gov, with "Comments on Draft SP 800-56B Rev. 2" in the subject line.