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Comment by rkeene2 | Hacker News Reader

Is there a FIPS 140-2 validated version of "s2n" somewhere ? I couldn't find anything close to it on the FIPS 140-2 validated products list.

If not, how does Amazon get away with using S3 as part of GovCloud, which purports itself to be NIST SP 800-53 compliant, one requirement of which is NIST SP 800-53 Control SC-13 ( https://web.nvd.nist.gov/view/800-53/Rev4/control?controlNam... ), which says, while it does not mandate cryptography, if you do use cryptography to satisfy any of the other controls the cryptography must be certified to the appropriate level (classified data must use NSA-approved cryptography, digital signatures must use FIPS-validated cryptography).

This is a base control for NIST SP 800-53, which is a requirement for FedRAMP.

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We're actively working on building a FIPS-compliant libcrypto with s2n. There are some quirks to the libcrypto API when FIPS mode is enabled. If this is something you would be interested in, feel free to fire up an issue for tracking: https://github.com/awslabs/s2n/issues

Keep in mind that FIPS-compliant and FIPS-validated are entirely different things and that NIST SP 800-53 specifies FIPS 140-2 validated operations for digital signatures.

The body text is a bit more qualified than the headline:

> we have replaced OpenSSL with s2n for all internal and external SSL traffic in Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) commercial regions

I suspect that "commercial regions" excludes govcloud.

Darn. I should have read the fine article, but I was really hopefully that there would be a migration path off OpenSSL... RedHat has FIPS validated most of their software, but it is expensive and slow work that someone building from source cannot leverage, unlike OpenSSL.

Maybe the title should be changed, since it implies that 100% of the SSL S3 traffic is using s2n ?

It appears to me that only the specification of the encryption algo has to be FIPS 140-2 approved. There is a list with approved functions and techniques.

FIPS PUB 140-2 Annexes: Annex A: Approved Security Functions (Draft 04-08-2016)

Annex B: Approved Protection Profiles (Draft 11-18-2015)

Annex C: Approved Random Number Generators (Draft 01-04-2016)

Annex D: Approved Key Establishment Techniques (Draft 10-08-2014)

NIST SP 800-53 SC-13 is pretty clear that it must not just be an approved function, but also FIPS validated cryptography, which is done under FIPS 140-2 and the validated products are listed here: http://csrc.nist.gov/groups/STM/cmvp/documents/140-1/140val-...

I've heard compliance people joke often enough that it's perfectly possible to get a piece of rock FIPS certified. (not that the standards are bad, necessarily, just the thrust of the policies are such that rocks would pass by sheer virtue of not enabling bad actions)

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