Federal Information Processing Standard

Federal Information Processing Standards or FIPS are standards promulgated by the U.S. Federal government for use by all (non-military) U.S. government agencies and U.S. government contractors, for information technology. Most FIPS standards are modified versions of standards used in the wider community (ANSI, IEEE, ISO etc.)

There are also some FIPS standards originally developed by the U.S. government, mostly standards for encoding data (e.g. country codes), but also DES encryption.

Examples of FIPS standards:

• FIPS two-letter country codes
• FIPS place codes
• FIPS county codes
• FIPS state codes