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. This package provides compliance for the core Kong Gateway product only.

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.

Note: As of Kong Gateway 3.0, Kong Gateway plugins can’t be considered FIPS-compliant. Future Kong Gateway releases aim to support plugins as well as distributions other than Ubuntu 20.04, such as RHEL.

Installing the Kong Gateway FIPS compliant Ubuntu package

The only supported Kong Gateway distribution is based on Ubuntu 20.04 and can be installed with the package distinctively named kong-enterprise-edition-fips.

To install the Kong Gateway FIPS package use:

  1. apt install kong-enterprise-edition-fips

Configure FIPS

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

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

You can also use an environment variable:

  1. export KONG_FIPS=on

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