Fedora Crypto Consolidation

History

Over the years there were attempts to consolidate cryptographic libraries in Fedora. The previous crypto consolidation effort is no longer pursued by the Fedora project. This page is retained as historical record, and to provide a simple guideline in selecting a crypto back-end when choice exists. Proceed to the historical record of the Crypto Consolidation Project.

Selecting a crypto library for Fedora

For applications which may provide multiple cryptographic back-ends, our recommendation is to utilize the back-end preferred by the upstream project/developer, as long as it does integrate with the Fedora system, that is, following Packaging:CryptoPolicies and Features/SharedSystemCertificates.

The Fedora base image effort for docker and other containers, tries to ship only OpenSSL, so for applications targeting the minimal base image, OpenSSL is the recommended library.

If still in doubt on which library to chose there are comparisons of TLS and crypto libraries available to assist in deciding.

• Wikipedia TLS lib comparison
• Wikipedia low-level crypto lib comparison
• Comparison for curl

Selecting a crypto library for Red Hat Enterprise Linux

When considering integration with Red Hat Enterprise Linux, it is recommended to utilize a library from the base crypto backends, as they are guaranteed to pass all relevant crypto certifications (i.e., FIPS-140-2). The base crypto backends are (in no particular order):

• NSS
• GnuTLS
• OpenSSL
• libgcrypt
• Link to RHEL FIPS140-2 certificates

Although nettle is available as a cryptographic back-end in Red Hat Enterprise Linux, it is not recommended to use directly, as it is considered an internal GnuTLS API and there is no API or ABI stability guarantee.

Selecting crypto backend for other languages

For other language bindings, we recommend utilizing wrappers over the base crypto libraries. Some examples:

• Java: the openjdk platform wraps over NSS
• Python: the python-cryptography package wraps over OpenSSL