Hacker News Reader

Comment by dkhenry | Hacker News Reader

So your post makes no sense. OpenSSL provides the FIPS portion directly. You can just download and compile it according to the instructions and you are now FIPS compliant just awaiting a certification. You can do this yourself, you don't need RedHat or Debian to do it for you.

This is one of the problems with Government and hopefully something that will change. All that is done is piece together bits of what outside vendors have put together and the piecing together is normally done by contractors.

View on HN

"just awaiting a certification."

You say that as if the certification part itself is remotely quick, predictable, or easy.

So you think recompiling OpenSSL from scratch, in doing so, deviating from the upstream vendor's supported binaries, and the dependency problems with updates it will cause, just to support a mostly smoke and mirrors standard is a good idea? I'd don't really think that's a best practice in commercial or government IT.

Exactly what the American people have come to expect from the government. Unless its been gift wrapped by a contractor they lack any ability to do anything technical.

You make a RPM and you deploy it like you would any other package. Yes it is a best practice, in fact the people at Red Hat do the _exact_ same thing, the difference is they have the technical capability to make those kinds of changes, as do most people in the commercial IT sector. The government is the one place where they call it IT when its really just glorified procurement.

However thats not even the problem as you stated its supported just fine. It has been for almost 9 years. The bigger issue is there was a perception is wasn't and instead of working to see what reality was people just did nothing.

> Exactly what the American people have come to expect from the government. Unless its been gift wrapped by a contractor they lack any ability to do anything technical.

Exactly the expectations that 18F would like to change.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com