Federal Information Processing Standard (FIPS)

Description

The Federal Information Processing Standard (FIPS) is a computer security standard which is developed by the U.S. Government and industry working groups to validate the quality of cryptographic modules. The FIPS standard provides four security levels to ensure adequate coverage of different industries, implementation of cryptographic modules, and organizational sizes and requirements.

FIPS 140-2 is the current standard for validating that mechanisms used to access cryptographic modules utilize authentication that meets industry and government requirements. For government systems, this allows Security Levels 1, 2, 3, or 4 for use on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.

See http://csrc.nist.gov/publications/PubsFIPS.html for more information.