As our industry shifts more of the responsibility for maintaining application security towards developers rather than exclusively within the hands of a dedicated cybersecurity team, developers are required to know more and more about niche compliance standards and security considerations they've never had to care about before.
If you work in a highly regulated industry or deal with government contracts, you've likely countered the term "FIPS." Let's break down what FIPS compliance means in the context of containers, why it matters, and how you can build FIPS-compliant images and workflows without slowing yourself down too much.
FIPS stands for Federal Information Processing Standards. The most relevant standard for developers is FIPS 140-2 (and its successor, FIPS 140-3), which defines the requirements for cryptographic modules used in federal systems.
FIPS defines requirements for everything from allowable encryption algorithms to data formats, but what most developers need to care about is the requirements for how cryptographic modules are built.
If you're deploying software in any regulated environment like finance or healthcare, especially if you're working with a government or the defense industry, you’re likely required to use FIPS-validated cryptographic libraries. If you're deploying your application using Kubernetes, the entire container runtime environment must comply.
FIPS validation isn't as simple as setting a feature flag. It’s a certification of specific versions of cryptographic modules, such as OpenSSL, when configured and compiled in a specific way.
For containers, FIPS compliance relies on three layers:
The FIPS standard doesn’t apply to the container itself, but because containers package everything into one image, they need to be assembled with FIPS in mind from the very beginning.
Even if your base image and libraries are FIPS-compliant, your application may pull packages that use insecure or non-validated cryptography. This makes dependency management one of the most important steps in achieving compliance. Developers should:
FIPS compliance in containerized applications is achievable, but it requires diligence across the development lifecycle in the selection of your base images, libraries, dependencies, and deployment environments.
It’s far easier to build with compliance in mind from the very beginning than to try shoehorning it in later on during development, so remember:
One of the easiest ways to simplify FIPS compliance is to start by using a FIPS-certified base image rather than hand-rolling your own. Minimus provides FIPS-certified images with minimal CVEs for a variety of environments and runtimes, reducing the amount of legwork you and the rest of your engineering team have to do to ensure compliance.
Explore Minimus FIPS-certified images and see how easily you can build compliance into your container workflows.
