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Comment by loeg | Hacker News Reader

Last time I checked (maybe 2019 or 2020), FIPS only permitted RSA for public-key cryptography. 1024-bit keys were no longer permitted, IIRC. If the company was involved in business with the USG (and many large companies are), they may have needed to comply with FIPS in some way (pure speculation). (Or the recommendation may have been on that basis, even if FIPS/USG was not involved in the ssh use.)

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On the whole, does FIPS improve security or is it one of those compliance checkboxes that actually reduces security of those who know what they’re doing?

FIPS 140 provides a standard for assuring that a product has implemented their crypto correctly. It has its warts but overall it skews very close to otuer published sources of algorithms. I think the biggest differences lie in handling edge cases and key generation.

That said, receiving a FIPS certification is a huge effort in terms of time and money. I think it is tragic that neither NIST nor the NSA provide a already certified library you can integrate in. That would save enormous amounts of effort. Fun fact - lots of FIPS certifications are white labeled openssl with the latest set of FIPS requirements so I'm not even being that radical.

It's often a requirement for any Federal customers. It's a mixed bag in terms of security, since it does force you off of _very bad_ algorithms, but it doesn't always support the best algorithms.

FIPS does permit elliptic curves, but only a subset of the NIST ones. So ed25519 and the other djb algorithms are not allowed

there are ongoing changes to allow ed25519, eg, see: https://csrc.nist.gov/publications/detail/fips/186/5/draft

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