Announcing Approval of Federal Information Processing Standard (FIPS) 186–2, Digital Signature Standard (DSS)
February 15, 2000

The Secretary of Commerce approved Federal Information Processing Standard 186-2, Digital Signature Standard (DSS), which supersedes Federal Information Processing Standard (FIPS) 186-1, Digital Signature Standard (DSS), FIPSs 186-2 expands FIPS 186-1 by specifying an additional voluntary industry standard for generating and verifying digital signatures. This action will enable Federal agencies to use the Digital Signature Algorithm (DSA), which was originally the single approved technique for digital signatures, as well as two new ANSI standards that were developed for the financial community. These new standards are ANSI X9.31, Digital Signature Using Reversible Public Key Cryptography, and ANSI X9.62, Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm (ECDSA).