Chapter 1. Federal Information Processing Standard (FIPS) readiness and compliance

The Federal Information Processing Standard (FIPS) developed by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) is regarded as the highly regarded for securing and encrypting sensitive data, notably in highly regulated areas such as banking, healthcare, and the public sector. Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) and OpenShift Container Platform support FIPS by providing a FIPS mode, in which the system only allows usage of specific FIPS-validated cryptographic modules like openssl. This ensures FIPS compliance.

1.1. Enabling FIPS compliance

Use the following procedure to enable FIPS compliance on your Red Hat Quay deployment.

Prerequisite

  • If you are running a standalone deployment of Red Hat Quay, your Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) deployment is version 8 or later and FIPS-enabled.
  • If you are using the Red Hat Quay Operator, OpenShift Container Platform is version 4.10 or later.
  • Your Red Hat Quay version is 3.5.0 or later.
  • You have administrative privileges for your Red Hat Quay deployment.

Procedure

  • In your Red Hat Quay config.yaml file, set the FEATURE_FIPS configuration field to true. For example:

    ---
    FEATURE_FIPS = true
    ---

    With FEATURE_FIPS set to true, Red Hat Quay runs using FIPS-compliant hash functions.