[PATCH v10 9/9] manual: Add documentation for arc4random functions

[Florian Weimer]

* Adhemerval Zanella Netto:

> We have discussed it before on a previous glibc weekly call (I can recall
> exactly which one), and if I recall correctly Florian has consulted with
> some internal developers that work direct with FIPS certification and 
> since we do not state that our implementation is cryptographic secure
> there is nothing prevents it to be used along with other on FIPS
> environment.

And it does not create an additional certification requirement, either.

> Although we do some FIPS support (fips-private.h), glibc itself does not
> really support FIPS certified cryptographic implementations (on fips
> enabled system some crypt functions just return EPERM). AFAIK, distro that
> aims to be FIPS certifies in fact disable crypt and use another library
> instead (libxcrypt for instance).

libcrypt can be built against part of the Netscape/Network Security
Services library (the other NSS).  This way, if you have a certified
variant of NSS, libcrypt inherits the certification.

But this stopped working a while ago because NSS no longer providers
digest functions required to implement certain forms of legacy password
hashing.  However, nowadays, password hashing is no longer considered
cryptographic functionality, so using DES or MD5 to support legacy
password hashes is not a blocker to cryptographic certification of the
overall system.  There does not seem to be interest in certifying
libcrypt or libxcrypt anymore, as far as I can tell, and this is
probably the right call.

Thanks,
Florian