Part IV Regulations and Compliance #

FIPS 140-3 is a security accreditation program for validating cryptographic modules produced by private companies. The Federal Information Processing Standards (FIPS) Publication 140 is a series of computer security standards developed by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) to ensure the quality of cryptographic modules.

If your organization does any work for the United States federal government, it is likely that your cryptography applications (such as openSSL, GnuTLS, and OpenJDK) will be required to be in compliance with Federal Information Processing Standards (FIPS) 140-3. If your organization is not required by compliance rules to run SUSE Linux Enterprise in FIPS mode, it is most likely best to not do it. This chapter provides guidance on enabling FIPS mode, and links to resources with detailed information.