Chapter 5. Security considerations

The Federal Information Processing Standard Publication 140-2 (FIPS-140-2) is a standard defining a set of security requirements for the use of cryptographic modules. This standard is mandated by law for US government agencies and contractors and is also referenced in other international and industry specific standards.

Red Hat OpenShift Data Foundation is now using FIPS validated cryptographic modules as delivered by Red Hat Enterprise Linux OS/CoreOS (RHCOS).

The cryptography modules are currently being processed by Cryptographic Module Validation Program (CMVP) and their state can be seen at Modules in Process List. For more up-to-date information, see the knowledge base article.

For more information, see installing a cluster in FIPS mode and support for FIPS cryptography.

A proxy environment is a production environment that denies direct access to the internet and provides an available HTTP or HTTPS proxy instead. Red Hat Openshift Container Platform is configured to use a proxy by modifying the proxy object for existing clusters or by configuring the proxy settings in the install-config.yaml file for new clusters.

Red Hat supports deployment of OpenShift Data Foundation in proxy environments when OpenShift Container Platform has been configured according to configuring the cluster-wide proxy.

Encryption lets you encode your data to make it impossible to read without the required encryption keys. This mechanism protects the confidentiality of your data in the event of a physical security breach that results in a physical media to escape your custody. The per-PV encryption also provides access protection from other namespaces inside the same OpenShift Container Platform cluster. Data is encrypted when it is written to the disk, and decrypted when it is read from the disk. Working with encrypted data might incur a small penalty to performance.

Encryption is only supported for new clusters deployed using Red Hat OpenShift Data Foundation 4.6 or higher. An existing encrypted cluster that is not using an external Key Management System (KMS) cannot be migrated to use an external KMS.

Currently, HashiCorp Vault is the only supported KMS for Cluster-wide and Persistent Volume encryptions. With OpenShift Data Foundation 4.7.0 and 4.7.1, only HashiCorp Vault Key/Value (KV) secret engine API, version 1 is supported. Starting with OpenShift Data Foundation 4.7.2, HashiCorp Vault KV secret engine API, versions 1 and 2 are supported.