BEDFORD, Mass., 27 June 2010.Cryptography experts at the MITRE Corp. in Bedford, Mass., are urging the aerospace and defense industry to participate in formulating cryptographic application programming interface (API) standard for aerospace, defense, and other high-assurance applications.
MITRE has submitted an internet-draft based on the publicly released version 0.6 of Common Interface to Cryptographic Modules (CICM) to the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). The proposed CICM standard is a U.S. Air Force-sponsored cryptographic API.
CICM is the first generic cryptographic API that allows for security domain separation and provides the rich module management support necessary for high-assurance cryptographic devices. The newest version of CICM is programming language agnostic and specifies a set of cryptographic primitives including encryption, signature generation, hashing, bypass, and keystream generation.
CICM also offers extensive support for key management including key agreement protocols in addition to the generation, protection, and destruction of key material. The specification has attracted significant interest within the DoD community and internationally, MITRE officials say.
CICM's ability to enable software to be decoupled from the provider of cryptographic services on a system enables organizations to deliver security-critical software more rapidly, with reduced risk, and at reduced cost, than is possible today.
MITRE experts are asking those interested to participate in the standards process by subscribing to the CICM mailing list. Those participating can join the discussion and help move the standard through the approval process, as well as be part of building a consensus around the standard's key features.
Subscribe to the CICM standard mailing list online at https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/cicm. The draft CICM standard is available for download at https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-lanz-cicm/.
For more information, contact the MITRE Corp.'s Dan Lanz by e-mail at [email protected], or Lev Novikov at [email protected]. Contact the MITRE Corp. online at www.mitre.org.
