Appendix C. Provisioning FIPS-compliant Hosts

Red Hat Satellite 6 supports provisioning hosts that comply with the National Institute of Standards and Technology’s Security Requirements for Cryptographic Modules standard, reference number FIPS 140-2, referred to here as FIPS.

To enable the provisioning of hosts that are FIPS-compliant, complete the following tasks:

  • Change the provisioning password hashing algorithm for the operating system
  • Create a host group and set a host group parameter to enable FIPS

For more information about creating host groups, see Creating a Host Group in the Managing Hosts guide.

The provisioned hosts have the FIPS-compliant settings applied. To confirm that these settings are enabled, complete the steps in Section C.3, “Verifying FIPS Mode is Enabled”.

C.1. Change the Provisioning Password Hashing Algorithm

To provision FIPS-compliant hosts, you must first set the password hashing algorithm that you use in provisioning to SHA256. This configuration setting must be applied for each operating system you want to deploy as FIPS-compliant.

  1. Identify the Operating System IDs. 

    $ hammer os list

    Example output: 

    ---|-----------------|--------------|-------
ID | TITLE           | RELEASE NAME | FAMILY
---|-----------------|--------------|-------
2  | RedHat 6.6      |              | Redhat
3  | RedHat 7.6      |              | Redhat
1  | RedHat 7.7      |              | Redhat
4  | RedHat 6.7      |              | Redhat
---|-----------------|--------------|-------

  2. Update each operating system’s password hash value. 

    $ hammer os update --title Operating_System \
  --password-hash SHA256

  3. Repeat this command for each of the operating systems, using the matching value in the TITLE column: 

    $ hammer os update --title "RedHat version_number" \
  --password-hash SHA256

    Note that you cannot use a comma-separated list of values.

C.2. Setting the FIPS Enabled Parameter

To provision a FIPS-compliant host, you must create a host group and set the host group parameter fips_enabled to true. If this is not set to true, or is absent, the FIPS-specific changes do not apply to the system. You can set this parameter when you provision a host or for a host group.

To set this parameter when provisioning a host, append --parameters fips_enabled=true to the Hammer command.

To set this parameter on an existing host group, enter the following command: 

$ hammer hostgroup set-parameter --name fips_enabled \
 --value 'true' \
 --hostgroup prod_servers

For more information, see the output of the command hammer hostgroup set-parameter --help.

C.3. Verifying FIPS Mode is Enabled

To verify that FIPS compliance is enabled, after you provision a host, complete the following steps:

  1. Log on to the host as root or with an admin-level account.

  2. Enter the following command: 

    cat /proc/sys/crypto/fips_enabled

A value of 1 confirms that FIPS mode is enabled.