I've been using openssl-fips for a couple of years. I'm looking to
upgrade to 2.0 because of the slow (~10 seconds) integrity check on my
platforms when using version 1.2 when I call "FIPS_mode_set()".
I've got the FIPS canister built, and I've got the openssl 1.0.1c
libraries all compiled, and all of my apps are now linking just fine.
Unfortunately there are some runtime issues I'm seeing, seemingly related
to the EVP_MC_CTX initialization (or lack thereof) prior to calling
EVP_DigestInit. The man page says that EVP_DigestInit will initialize the
input EVP_MD_CTX structure. In the openssl source code that is indeed the
case -- EVP_DigestInit immediately calls "EVP_MD_CTX_init" and everything
is happy.
However, when I'm using the new 2.0 openssl FIPS module, it seems to me
like it doesn't do a similar initialization -- it's probably calling
FIPS_digestinit in the background due to the re-definition of
EVP_DigestInit to FIPS_digestinit in openssl/fipssyms.h or something. Most
apps (for instance, openssh) depend on this CTX initialization, and
without it they tend to seg fault randomly on me. The code in the apps
will often do something like this -- creating a CTX structure on the stack
and using it immediately:
EVP_MD_CTX md;
EVP_DigestInit(&md, kex->evp_md);
Again, this works fine with the non-FIPS version of openssl, and even
worked fine in older FIPS openssl (version 1.2). However, now I get seg
faults.
I put together a patch for openssh that initializes every EVP_MD_CTX right
after creation (using the EVP_MD_CTX_init function), and now openssh works
just great! All of my seg faults in openssh have gone away. However,
I've got a pile of other apps (python, php, net-snmmp, etc) which are also
skipping the call to "EVP_MD_CTX_init". I don't think it's appropriate
(or maintainable) for me to patch every single app that ever uses an
EVP_MD_CTX. What have other users been doing to solve this problem?
And finally, I don't know if this question is more well suited for the
-dev or the -users mailing list, so I put it in -users and expect that it
can be copied to -dev if needed.
Thanks in advance for any help!
Kind Regards,
Brian Aanderud
