John Ruiz, Software Engineer

If you're using any form of cryptography in Java, you might be aware of NIST FIPS 140-2, which lays out what you can and cannot use on federal information processing systems. Oracle documentation, true to form, only gets you 80% of the way there.  Here's their technical notes on FIPS 140 compliance . So here are the step-by-step instructions for configuring java with a FIPS-compliant Provider (SunPKCS11-NSS). First, you need to install the libraries if you haven't already.  These are written by Mozilla, and have gone through NIST's Cryptographic Module Validation Program (CMVP) .  Luckily, they're available for RedHat/CentOS/Fedora, and can be installed through yum. sudo yum install nss-pkcs11-devel  Next, you need to configure your JRE to add the provider.  You do this by editing ${jre.home}/lib/security/java.security and adding a reference to the SunPKCS11 provider. On my Fedora 19 box, I have both the OpenJDK and SunJDK installed.  Here are the locat