Since the early 1970s. NIST has been 

 developing cost-effective ways to help 

 protect computerized data. NIST has 

 devised a prototype system for control- 

 ling access to a computer system that 

 uses a password, a smart card, a finger- 

 print reader, and cryptography. 



tocols on communication performance in order to mini- 

 mize communication bottlenecl<s between application 

 programs. NIST researchers have implemented a high 

 speed communications testbed that provides a HIPPI 

 link to a performance instrumented workstation. 

 Testbed performance instrumentation includes a modi- 

 fied NIST MultiKron performance data capture chip 

 interfaced to the test workstation. The workstation 

 HIPPI interface was designed, implemented and 

 obtained through a collaborative effort with the 

 VISTANet project, one of the NREN gigabit testbeds. 



In FY 1994, NIST will employ systems instrumented with 

 the MultiKron chip to investigate the behavior and per- 

 formance of communications protocols suitable for multi- 

 gigabit/second transmission rates. For high perfor- 

 mance networking, NIST will support transition planning 

 and deployment of ISDN and OSI-based protocols in the 

 Internet and undertake research and development activ- 

 ities to support emerging Broadband ISDN standards. 

 NIST will continue to interact with industry by sponsoring 

 and hosting the North American ISDN Users Forum. 



NIST activities in the areas of networking and communi- 

 cations technology will be expanded to address applica- 

 tions of information infrastructure including electronic 

 commerce, distributed multimedia environments, and 

 adaptive systems. Support for electronic commerce will 

 focus on enabling electronic exchange technology and 

 protocols to support business transactions and manu- 

 facturing techniques. NIST will develop improved elec- 

 tronic data interchange methodology to describe, 

 access, and update data. In FY 1994, an integration 

 facility will be created for manufacturing applications of 

 electronic commerce. 



NIST activities in distributed multimedia environments 

 will include the development of methodology to acquire 

 and administer the large amounts of text and multimedia 

 material associated with electronic libraries and the 

 implementation of information retrieval mechanisms for 

 easy access to information by untrained end users. 

 NIST activities in adaptive systems will include research 

 in wireless communication compression and encoding 

 technology. NIST will also conduct workshops to 

 assess network security requirements and develop net- 

 work security technology suitable for Internet and other 

 networking technologies. 



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