Preface Standards development within the Information Technology sector is harmonized with international standards development. Through the CSA Technical Committee on Information Technology (TCIT), Canadians serve as the Canadian Advisory Committee (CAC) on ISO/IEC Joint Technical Committee 1 on Information Technology (ISO/IEC JTC1) for the Standards Council of Canada (SCC), the ISO member body for Canada and sponsor of the Canadian National Committee of the IEC. Also, as a member of the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), Canada participates in the International Telegraph and Telephone Consultative Committee (ITU-T). At the time of publication, ISO/IEC 9798-6:2010 is available from ISO and IEC in English only. CSA will publish the French version when it becomes available from ISO and IEC. Scope This part of ISO/IEC 9798 specifies eight entity authentication mechanisms based on manual data transfer between authenticating devices. It indicates how these mechanisms can be used to support key management functions, and provides guidance on secure choices of parameters for the mechanisms. A comparison of the levels of security and efficiency provided by the eight mechanisms is given. Such mechanisms can be appropriate in a variety of circumstances. One such application occurs in personal networks, where the owner of two personal devices capable of wireless communications wishes them to perform an entity authentication procedure as part of the process of preparing them for use in the network.