Should cloud service providers be concerned with FIPS 140-3?

If you’ve dealt with FedRAMP, you may already know that FIPS 140-2 is the standard for cryptographic modules published by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). All cloud service providers (CSPs) who wish to be FedRAMP compliant must use only crypto modules that have been validated by NIST in their Cryptographic Module Validation Program (CMVP) to ensure they comply with FIPS 140-2.

An update to the standard – FIPS 140-3 – was published in 2019, and Coalfire’s FedRAMP Assurance Services (FAS) team has received questions about it from CSPs, mostly around what kind of impact it will have on them as they go through the FedRAMP process.

The FIPS 140 standard contains the security requirements for cryptographic modules. It’s fairly lengthy and has several appendices (annexes). If you read the new 140-3 standard, you would see that it is basically empty except to state that it has been replaced with the international standard ISO/IEC 19790. And then if you actually reviewed the ISO standard, you would see that it is nearly identical to FIPS 140-2 except that, in addition to all the old crypto algorithms that were allowed before (like AES, Triple-DES, RSA, and HMAC), you can now use newer algorithms like:

• MISTY1, CAST-128, HIGHT, Camellia, etc., for symmetric encryption
• DEM1, DEM2, DEM3, ECIES-KEM, RSA-KEM for data and key encapsulation methods
• MDx-MAC in addition to HMAC for message authentication codes

Do CSPs need to understand these new algorithms or read the ISO standards? Not really, because the FIPS 140 standard is for vendors who make the crypto modules. It contains the requirements that their crypto modules must comply with and which they will be tested against in the CMVP labs. CSPs only need to make sure they use one of the crypto modules that have been tested / validated against this standard. As long as you use a crypto module that is listed on the CMVP website, you will meet the FedRAMP requirements for FIPS.

Are there any FIPS 140-3 modules available? No, not yet. Below is the timetable that CMVP has published for availability of crypto modules that comply with FIPS 140-3. As you can see, they will not even begin accepting modules for validation until September 2020. The sunset date for the last of the modules that comply with FIPS 140-2 is not until 2026.

The bottom line is that CSPs have a little time before they must upgrade their FIPS modules in their FedRAMP systems; however, we suggest that CSPs start planning now to upgrade their products containing FIPS modules so they will pass their annual FedRAMP assessments without any problems.