Bureaucracy invariably requires compliance, and only compliance. Some problems can be cast in terms of compliance and thus solved in a bureaucracy, but security is not and never will be one them.
Both.
> All the auditors are saying is that you have to use a FIPS approved algorithm.
... which is a problem, because FIPS approved doesn’t imply secure.
Bcrypt is a better password hashing algorithm than any FIPS-approved algorithm at this time. Don’t agree with me? Read up on it. I’m not necessarily recommending it though - there are others that may be even better, depending on the circumstance.
> they are using something else that’s not approved by FIPS (for good reason I might add)
What reason? Is there an expert cryptographer’s opinion or any expert cracking reports you can reference? Just because a group of experts decided a certain list of algos were “approved” several years ago doesn’t mean that newer algos designed or popularized since then are less secure.
Authority alone doesn’t confer reality or truth.
And unlike compliance, security is a process, not a destination.
Compliance is mostly intended to prevent really hideous errors from falling through the cracks. Nobody believes that you can't build a compliant, insecure system, or that you can't build a secure, non-compliant system.
Though by preventing hideous errors from falling through the cracks, compliance requirements also often prevent the best decisions from being made.