FIPS 140-3 compliance in AI Gateway

The Federal Information Processing Standard (FIPS) 140-3 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 AI Gateway package is FIPS 140-3 compliant. Compliance means that AI Gateway only uses FIPS 140-3 approved algorithms while running in FIPS mode, but the product has not been submitted to a NIST testing lab for validation.

AI Gateway provides the FIPS 140-3 compliant package for supported distributions, including distroless packages. This package provides compliance for the core AI Gateway product and all out-of-the-box policies.

The package uses the OpenSSL FIPS Provider 3.1.2 to provide FIPS 140-3 validated cryptographic operations.

To start a data plane in FIPS mode, set the following configuration property to on in the kong.conf configuration file before starting AI Gateway:

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

You can also set this configuration using an environment variable:

export KONG_FIPS=on

Warning: Migrating from non-FIPS to FIPS mode, or the reverse, is not supported.

The following table describes how AI Gateway uses key derivation functions:

FIPS only defines the approved algorithms to use for each specific purpose, so FIPS policy doesn’t explicitly restrict the usage of cryptographic algorithms to only cases where they are necessary.

For example, using SHA-256 as the message digest algorithm is approved, while MD5 is not. However, that doesn’t mean MD5 must be completely absent from the application.

The following table explains where cryptographic algorithms are used for non-cryptographic purposes in AI Gateway:

FIPS 140-3 defines requirements for the cryptographic module, not for SSL client roles. AI Gateway does not enforce a FIPS-specific policy on outbound clients.

Traffic that traverses AI Gateway’s own inbound and outbound TLS enforcement does honor the TLS 1.2/1.3 and applies the following constraints: