Hacker News

FIPS just locks you into a specific (generally fairly old) version of everything and sets some more annoying defaults. The only benefit is to be able to check a box on a form saying you qualify.

FIPS is pain

> fractal layers of ossified cruft

Someone got a thesaurus in their coffee today! (Not a jab)

but wolfssl is in the business of selling FIPS compliance so…

Yes, but be aware, openvpn is much better if you live in a Country like China, Russia and a few others. That is due to a known design issue with wireguard.

For most people, wireguard is fine.

Edit: I should have said "choice" instead of "issue", but Firefox 140 is failing on this site so I could not correct the txt. I was able to edit this after reverting back to Firefox 128.

Crypto wise, fips is outdated but not horrible.

Actual fips compliant (certified) gives you confidence in some basic competence of the solution.

Just fips compatible (i.e. picking algos that could be fips compliant) is generally neutral to negative.

I'm not 100% up to date, so that might have changed, but AEAD used to be easier if you don't follow fips than fips compatible. Still possible, but more foot guns due to regulatory lag in techniques.

Overall, IMO the other top-level comment of "only fips if you have pencil pusher benefit" applies.

My limited understanding is that issues like being vulnerable to side channel attacks are very difficult to detect. So you have to have shown that the entire development process is safe. From the code to the compiler to the hardware to the microcode, it all needs to be checked. That said it does seem like compliance is a bigger priority than safety.

There is no security advantages or technical grounds for using FIPS algorithms in a WireGuard clone instead of Chacha / Blake2. It's purely a compliance move. ChaPoly, Blake2, etc, are not known to be broken and we have every reason to believe they are strong.

If you're considering whether to use a FIPS 140-3 module for your cryptography, consider that FIPS 140-3 is really only for specific compliance verticals. If you don't know whether you need it, you probably don't need it.

So, along those lines, if you wonder whether a package's cryptography should be FIPS 140-3 compliant, then the real question is whether you are a vertical that needs to be compliant. Again, if you aren't sure, the answer is likely NO.

I presume it's a product strategy to provide a box of "compliant" libraries/services, so other companies can quickly tick and sign a checkbox saying "we use compliant VPN", because someone else is going to look whether the checkbox is ticked and signed, because someone else is going to...

No.

Getting a crypto module validated by FIPS 140-3 simply lets you sell to the US Government (something something FedRAMP). It doesn't give you better assurance in the actual security of your designs or implementations, just verifies that you're using algorithms the US government has blessed for use in validated modules, in a way that an independent lab has said "LGTM".

You generally want to layer your compliance (FIPS, etc.) with actual assurance practices.

No, there are not.

In fairness, modern versions of FIPS are much less awful. AFAICT it's now possible to be FIPS compliant and meet reasonable crypto expectations, which was not always the case before.

It's fine. None of the FIPS algorithms are known to be broken, either. The only risk here is implementation bugs doing the conversion and any maintenance burden incurred due to diverging from upstream wireguard.

The ciphers used by WireGuard are not FIPS 140-3 certified. So you have to also change the ciphers, as is done in this project.