The transition from paper to electronic media brings with it the need for electronic privacy and authenticity. Public-key cryptography offers fundamental technology addressing this need. Many alternative public-key techniques have been proposed, each with its own benefits. However, there has been no single, comprehensive reference defining a full range of common public-key techniques covering key agreement, public-key encryption, digital signatures, and identification from several families, such as discrete logarithms, integer factorization, and elliptic curves. It is not the purpose of this project to mandate any particular set of public-key techniques, or particular attributes of public-key techniques such as key sizes. Rathere, the purpose is to provide a reference for specifications of a variety of techniques from which applications may select. When the IEEE P1363a project began, work was in progress in the IEEE P1363 project on specifying many of the basic techniques in a standard way. Additional techniques remained to be specified, which could eventually be added to the IEEE P1363 work. However, many of those additional techniques required further development before being standardized, whereas the basic techniques in IEEE Std 1363-2000 were relatively more established. To facilitate the completion of the work on the basic techniques while also providing a forum for discussing additional techniques, the IEEE P1363 working group sought to have separate projects for the two efforts, which would result in separate, companion standards for some period of time. It is the working group's intention that the standards will be merged during future revisions.