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: