American National Standards Institute

A private, not-for-profit association that administers U.S. private-sector voluntary standards.

Tutorial: ANSI has approximately 1,000 member organizations, including equipment users, manufacturers, and others. These include commercial firms, governmental agencies, and other institutions and international entities.

ANSI is the sole U.S. representative to (a) ISO and (b) (via the U.S. National Committee) the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC), which are the two major, non-treaty, international standards organizations.

ANSI provides a forum for ANSI-accredited standards development groups. Among those groups, the following are especially relevant to Internet security:

• International Committee for Information Technology Standardization (INCITS) (formerly X3): Primary U.S. focus of standardization in information and communications technologies, encompassing storage, processing, transfer, display, management, organization, and retrieval of information. Example: [A3092].
• Accredited Standards Committee X9: Develops, establishes, maintains, and promotes standards for the financial services industry. Example: [A9009].
• Alliance for Telecommunications Industry Solutions (ATIS): Develops standards, specifications, guidelines, requirements, technical reports, industry processes, and verification tests for interoperability and reliability of telecommunications networks, equipment, and software. Example: [A1523].