zfs crypto discuss - Feb 2009 - ZFS encryption

Few questions - are there thoughts on having the ZFS encryption validated for
compliance wtih FIPS 140-2 cryptography standards?  Here is the current list:

http://csrc.nist.gov/groups/STM/cavp/documents/aes/aesval.html

We are using Open Solaris and just had a FIPS 140-2 requirement placed on our
data center.  We have huge performance requirements relative to I/O and
bandwidth to disk and the ZFS option would resolve a big issue.  Otherwise it
gets rapidly unaffordable to implement if we need to do it in the SAN fabric.

Thanks!

Gerry Bragg
gerry.bragg at altarum.org
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This message posted from opensolaris.org

Gerry Bragg wrote:
> Few questions - are there thoughts on having the ZFS encryption validated
for compliance wtih FIPS 140-2 cryptography standards?  Here is the current
list:
ZFS encryption will not be FIPS 140-2 evaluated because it doesn''t make
sense. FIPS 140-2 applies to the implemention of cryptographic 
algorithms and the key boundary.  There will be no implementation of any 
cryptographic algorithms in the ZFS code based.  All the crypto comes 
from the OpenSolaris Cryptographic Framework.

What does make sense is for a FIPS 140-2 evaluation of the software 
implementation of the algorithms and the cryptographic framework.

Note also that in general only final product binaries get a FIPS 140-2 
evaluation, however the recent OpenSSL evaluation paved the way to do 
something different.

For ZFS Crypto it will automatically use any crypto providers plugged 
into the kernel crypto framework (kcf) and can thus use the FIPS 140-2 @ 
Level 3 evaluated SCA-6000 card from Sun (which works on SPARC and x86).

Sun is aware of the need for FIPS 140-2 evaluation of the framework and 
is in the process of doing the necessary engineering work for that.
The progress (what of it we can legally and for business reasons make 
public) is available from the http://opensolaris.org/os/project/crypto/ 
pages.

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Darren J Moffat