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DSS is part of the U.S. government's Capstone program to develop cryptography and security standards that must be used by government agencies and private companies doing business with the government as specified in FIPS (Federal Information Processing Standard). NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology) and NSA (National Security Agency) are responsible for Capstone. Capstone's major components include an encryption algorithm called Skipjack (and a Skipjack encryption chip called Clipper), a hash function called SHA-1 (Secure Hash Standard), and DSA (Digital Signature Algorithm). Capstone is also working on a key exchange protocol.

DSS, which was made a standard in 1994, provides authentication but not encryption. Therefore, it can only be used for digital signatures-as compared to the RSA system, which can be used for encryption and digital signatures.

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