NIST CONTRIBUTES TO NEW ANSI STANDARD FOR FINANCIAL SERVICES INDUSTRY.

The American National Standards Institute (ANSI) recently approved ANSI X9.42-2001, Public Key Cryptography For the Financial Services Industry: Agreement of Symmetric Keys Using Discrete Logarithm Cryptography, as an ANSI standard. MST's role in producing the standard involved coordinating the development of the standard and serving as primary editor. The X9.42-2001 standard defines the secure establishment of cryptographic data for the keying of symmetrically keyed algorithms (e.g., Triple Data Encryption Algorithm [TDEA]). Schemes are provided for the agreement of symmetric keys using DiffieHeliman and MQV algorithms.

The Diffie-Hellman key agreement mechanism is a well-understood and widely implemented public key technique that facilitates cost-effective cryptographic key agreement across modern distributed electronic networks such as the Internet. The MQV algorithm is a variation of the Diffie-Heilman algorithm that has more security attributes and may provide better performance over analogous Diffie-Heilman methods. Because the Diffie-Hellman and the MQV techniques are based on the same fundamental mathematics as the Digital Signature Algorithm (DSA), additional efficiencies and functionality may be obtained by combining these and other cryptographic techniques.

The standard divides the key agreement process into the following major components: domain parameter generation, domain parameter validation, key pair generation, public key validation, shared secret value calculation, key derivation, and test message authentication code computation for discrete logarithm problem based key agreement schemes. Using these components, different parties may establish a piece of common shared secret information such as cryptographic keys. The shared secret information may be used with symmetrically keyed algorithms to provide confidentiality, authentication, and data integrity services for financial information or used as a key-encrypting key with other ANSI X9 key management protocols.

Currently, NIST is developing guidelines for validating implementations of ANSI X9.42. These validation tests are designed to address the individual components of ANSI X9.42. ITL will write both a document and the software to perform these validation tests for the different components of ANSI X9.42.