Date Published: October 2019
Comments Due:
Email Questions to:
Author(s)
National Institute of Standards and Technology
Announcement
A Federal Register Notice (FRN) announces a
Request for Comments on Draft FIPS 186-5 and Draft Special Publication (SP) 800-186. NIST seeks public comments on multiple issues listed in the
Request for Comments section of the FRN. The public comment period ends January 29, 2020. Comments may be
emailed to NIST or submitted to Regulations.gov (Docket no.
NIST-2019-004). Relevant comments received by the deadline will be published on CSRC and Regulations.gov without change or redaction, so commenters should not include information they do not wish to be posted (e.g., personal or confidential business information). Comments that contain profanity, vulgarity, threats, or other inappropriate language or content will not be posted or considered.
NIST is proposing updates to its standards on digital signatures and elliptic curve cryptography to align with existing and emerging industry standards. As part of these updates, NIST is proposing to adopt two new elliptic curves, Ed25519 and Ed448, for use with EdDSA. EdDSA is a deterministic elliptic curve signature scheme currently specified in the Internet Research Task Force (IRTF) RFC 8032, Edwards-Curve Digital Signature Algorithm. NIST further proposes adopting a deterministic variant of ECDSA, which is currently specified in RFC 6979, Deterministic Usage of the Digital Signature Algorithm and Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm. Finally, based on feedback received on the adoption of the current elliptic curve standards, the draft standards deprecate curves over binary fields due to their limited use by industry.
The proposed digital signature algorithms are included in Draft FIPS 186-5, Digital Signature Standard. NIST-recommended elliptic curves, previously specified in FIPS 186-4 Appendix D, are now included in Draft NIST Special Publication (SP) 800-186, Recommendations for Discrete Logarithm-Based Cryptography: Elliptic Curve Domain Parameters, which has a concurrent public comment period (ending January 29, 2020).
Noting increased industry adoption of ECDSA within security products, Draft FIPS 186-5 proposes the removal of the Digital Signature Algorithm (DSA). This removal would prohibit use of DSA for generating digital signatures, while legacy use of DSA to verify existing signatures would be allowed.
Draft FIPS 186-5 includes other updates intended to maintain normative references within the standard, as well as updates to technical content based on current cryptographic research.
This standard specifies a suite of algorithms that can be used to generate a digital signature. Digital signatures are used to detect unauthorized modifications to data and to authenticate the identity of the signatory. In addition, the recipient of signed data can use a digital signature as evidence in demonstrating to a third party that the signature was, in fact, generated by the claimed signatory. This is known as non-repudiation since the signatory cannot easily repudiate the signature at a later time.
This standard specifies a suite of algorithms that can be used to generate a digital signature. Digital signatures are used to detect unauthorized modifications to data and to authenticate the identity of the signatory. In addition, the recipient of signed data can use a digital signature as...
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This standard specifies a suite of algorithms that can be used to generate a digital signature. Digital signatures are used to detect unauthorized modifications to data and to authenticate the identity of the signatory. In addition, the recipient of signed data can use a digital signature as evidence in demonstrating to a third party that the signature was, in fact, generated by the claimed signatory. This is known as non-repudiation since the signatory cannot easily repudiate the signature at a later time.
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Keywords
computer security; cryptography; digital signatures; Federal Information Processing Standards; public key cryptography
Control Families
System and Communications Protection
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