Why FIPS 140 Means Running Old Code

You need to use FIPS 140 because of compliance, but have you ever asked what that requirement is actually for? What security properties are the authors of these policies trying to achieve? In high-assurance deployments, the practical goal is usually to establish a meaningful security boundary around cryptographic keys. Organizations want explicit controls over who and what can use a key, and they do not want the answer to be every application or administrator with access to the host. They are also worried about key theft and abuse. For important signing and decryption keys, keeping the key out of the hands of the application and host OS is often the simplest way to force reasonable key-protection practices. These are real problems. When the threat group Storm-0558 acquired a highly sensitive Microsoft MSA signing key, operational failures allowed key material to escape the isolated signing environment and become accessible from a compromised engineering environment. That single…