Full Disk Encryption solutions selected for US Government use

[Peter Gutmann]

Stephan Somogyi <cryptography at lt.gross.net> writes:

>FIPS 140(-2) is about validating cryptographic implementations. It is not
>about certifying entire products that contain ample functionality well
>outside the scope of cryptographic evaluation. That's more of a Common
>Criteria thing.

Not necessarily.  It's up to the vendor to draw the boundary around what they
want evaluated.  In some cases it's purely a single crypto module, in others
it's significant portions of the application using the crypto (and I guess
this would be the case for FDE, where pretty much the entire application does
nothing but crypto).  The advantage of the former is that there's less to
evaluate, the advantage of the latter is that there's less paperwork to handle
things like data crossing cryptomodule boundaries, which can happen in cases
where most of your key management is done outside the core crypto code.
However with the latter you can also declare large chunks of your code non-
security-relevant and therefore out of scope, so you get the benefits of a
fairly broad perimeter but not too much actual code to get checked.  It's
give-and-take with the evaluators, generally you juggle things to get the most
benefit for the least amount of work (which doesn't necessarily correspond to
the most thorough evaluation).

>OpenSSL FIPS Object Module 1.1.1 has FIPS 140-2 when running on SUSE 9.0 and
>HPUX 11i, according to
>
><http://csrc.nist.gov/groups/STM/cmvp/documents/140-1/1401val2007.htm#733>
>
>In the context of a conversation about whether something formally has FIPS
>validation or not, the details are important.

Only if you know what FIPS 140 is.  For procurement people, FIPS 140 is a
capitalised word and a small integer value printed next to a checklist item.
If the software meets their requirements and pricing expectations then they'll
look for something somewhere in the vicinity of the product that's close
enough to saying "FIPS 140", check the box, and they're done.

Peter.

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