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FIPS 140-2

The Federal Information Processing Standard (FIPS) 140-2 is a federal standard defined by the National Institute of Standards and Technology. It specifies the security requirements that must be satisfied by a cryptographic module. The FIPS Kong Gateway package is FIPS 140-2 compliant. Compliance means that the software has met all of the rules of FIPS 140-2, but has not been submitted to a NIST testing lab for validation.

Kong Enterprise provides a FIPS 140-2 compliant package for Ubuntu 20.04 , Ubuntu 22.04, and Red Hat Enterprise 8 . This package provides compliance for the core Kong Gateway product .

The package replaces the primary library in Kong Gateway, OpenSSL, with BoringSSL, which at its core uses the FIPS 140-2 validated BoringCrypto for cryptographic operations.

Installing the Kong Gateway FIPS compliant package

Ubuntu

RHEL

The FIPS compliant Ubuntu 20.04 package can be installed using the package distinctively named kong-enterprise-edition-fips. To install the package follow these instructions:

Set up the Kong APT repository:

 curl -1sLf "https://packages.konghq.com/public/gateway-31/gpg..key" |  gpg --dearmor >> /usr/share/keyrings/kong-gateway-31-archive-keyring.gpg
 curl -1sLf "https://packages.konghq.com/public/gateway-31/config.deb.txt?distro=ubuntu&codename=$(lsb_release -sc)" > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/kong-gateway-31.list

Update the repository:
```
 sudo apt-get update
```

Install the Kong Gateway FIPS package:

 apt install -y kong-enterprise-edition-fips=3.1.1.5

The FIPS compliant Red Hat 8 package can be installed using the package distinctively named kong-enterprise-edition-fips. To install the package follow these instructions:

Package

Yum repo

Download the FIPS package:

 curl -Lo kong-enterprise-edition-fips-3.1.1.5.rpm $(rpm --eval https://packages.konghq.com/public/gateway-31/rpm/el/%{rhel}/x86_64/kong-enterprise-edition-fips-3.1.1.5.el%{rhel}.x86_64.rpm)

Install the Kong Gateway FIPS package:

 yum install kong-enterprise-edition-fips-3.1.1.5

Set up the Kong Yum repository:

 curl -1sLf "https://packages.konghq.com/public/gateway-31/config.rpm.txt?distro=el&codename=$(rpm --eval '%{rhel}')" | sudo tee /etc/yum.repos.d/kong-gateway-31.repo
 sudo yum -q makecache -y --disablerepo='*' --enablerepo='kong-gateway-31'

Install the Kong Gateway FIPS package:

 yum install kong-enterprise-edition-fips-3.1.1.5

Configure FIPS

To start in FIPS mode, set the following variable to on in the kong.conf configuration file before starting Kong Gateway.

fips = on # fips mode is enabled, causing incompatible ciphers to be disabled

You can also use an environment variable:

export KONG_FIPS=on

Migrating from non-FIPS to FIPS mode and backwards is not supported.