Table of Contents

• Description
  • This is a SIMP module
• Setup
  • What fips affects
• > FIPS mode disables md5 hashing at a library level. Enabling it may have unintended consequences.
  • Beginning with fips
• > method to consistently configure all SIMP modules with your intended FIPS mode.
• Reference
• Limitations
• Development
  • Acceptance tests

Description

This module enables Federal Information Processing Standard(FIPS) mode at the kernel level. FIPS Publication 140-2, is a computer security standard, developed by a U.S. Government and industry working group to validate the quality of cryptographic modules. FIPS publications (including 140-2) can be found at the following URL: http://csrc.nist.gov/publications/PubsFIPS.html. Enabling FIPS mode installs an integrity checking package and modifies ciphers available for applications to use.

This module manages the kernel parameters and packages required for enabling FIPS mode in supported operating systems.

This is a SIMP module

This module is a component of the System Integrity Management Platform, a compliance-management framework built on Puppet.

If you find any issues, they may be submitted to our bug tracker.

Setup

What fips affects

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WARNING

FIPS mode disables md5 hashing at a library level. Enabling it may have unintended consequences.

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• Kernel parameters and Grub
• Dracut and initrd
• Packages:
  • nss
  • dracut-fips
  • fipscheck

Beginning with fips

Include the fips class.

• By default, this will enable FIPS mode.
• To ensure that FIPS mode is disabled, set simp_options::fips to false.
  • Do not set fips::enabled directly to false―it defaults to the value of simp_options::fips (as do the FIPS-related parameters of all other SIMP modules).

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IMPORTANT

Setting simp_options::fips to either true or false is by far the best method to consistently configure all SIMP modules with your intended FIPS mode.

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Reference

See REFERENCE.md for details.

Limitations

SIMP Puppet modules are generally intended for use on Red Hat Enterprise Linux and compatible distributions, such as CentOS. Please see the metadata.json file for the most up-to-date list of supported operating systems, Puppet versions, and module dependencies.

Development

Please read our Contribution Guide.

Acceptance tests

This module includes Beaker acceptance tests using the SIMP Beaker Helpers.

By default the tests use Vagrant with VirtualBox as a back-end; Vagrant and VirtualBox must both be installed to run these tests without modification. To execute the tests run the following:

bundle install
bundle exec rake beaker:suites

Please refer to the SIMP Beaker Helpers documentation for more information.