IBM Cloud Private platform considerations for FIPS compliance

Federal Information Processing Standards (FIPS ) are information technology standards that are developed by the United States federal government related to encoding and encrypting data.

For the ciphers that are supported by FIPS, see the following documents:

• For Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), see Security Guide .
• For Ubuntu, see Computer Security Resource Center .
• For SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES), see Computer Security Resource Center .

You can meet FIPS requirements for IBM Cloud Private by using the following procedures:

• Encrypting cluster data network traffic with IPsec
• Encrypting volumes by using dm-crypt
• Encrypting network traffic to external endpoints and the management console, ingress service, image manager, Docker registry, and authentication manager. For more information, see the fips_enabled parameter on the Customizing the cluster with the config.yaml file page. To enable or disable FIPS mode after IBM Cloud Private installation, see Enabling and disabling FIPS mode.
• Encrypting Kubernetes secrets with Key Management Service plug-in
• Example: Enabling FIPS on IBM Cloud Private