High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! Capstone is the name of a United States government long-term project to develop cryptography standards for public and government use. Capstone was driven by the NIST and the NSA; the project began in 1993. The initiative involved four standard algorithms: a data encryption algorithm called Skipjack, along with the Clipper chip that included the Skipjack algorithm, a digital signature algorithm, DSA, a hash function, SHA-1, and a key exchange protocol. Captstone`s first implementation was in the Fortezza PCMCIA card.