[api]

I can tell you that as long as the crypto in WireGuard is DJB stuff that can't be FIPS certified, Cisco and Juniper and such will still do a strong VPN business and you will rarely see it in BigCo, at least in the US.

Security is largely about checking boxes to reduce liability, and FIPS is a checkbox.

Corporate IT is unbelievably conservative. It's all still about Active Directory, Windows domains, and SSL VPNs with FIPS certification and AD support.

[mschuster91]

Corp IT is still on AD as AD is literally the foundation of everything MS based. No matter if Exchange, workstations, file servers, even Office 365 - all is stored in Active Directory. Even their cloud services, even Microsoft Partner Program, it's all AD under the hood.

Sure you can use Samba / OpenLDAP / half a dozen of IMAP/SMTP servers for groupware but holy hell administering it is an utter hellhole of a mess compared to the MS offerings.

Corp IT cares about two things: retraining costs for employees and admins, and efficiency. And Apache Directory Studio just doesn't cut it compared with AD Editor.

[kazen44]

Also, AD is probably one of microsoft's best products.

It's actually rather stable, and can integrate with nearly everything.

[duelingjello]

Fun ancient fact from AD administration c. Win2k3:

AD can optionally replicate by sending email (SMTP) between sites.

[kazen44]

as far as i know this is still supported.

i know this option has existed till atleast 2008.

[samgranieri]

Humor me: What would prevent DJB's crypto from being certified by FIPS?

[tptacek]

Convincing the USG to raise Chapoly to the level of AES, thus essentially defeating the purpose of standardizing AES in the first place.

The more productive approach is to work on convincing stodgy enterprises that FIPS is a bad thing (which it is).

[api]

Bureaucratic inertia. I've been hoping for years that it'll be certified. They've talked about Curve25519 and Curve448 for a while but no movement so far. My insider sources tell me there's opposition, but I have no clue why... either the NSA prefers weaker crypto or (more likely) industry wants the status quo because they fear competition from open source superior products like WireGuard among many others.

[tptacek]

I feel like having a restricted set of algorithms in FIPS 140-2 is kind of the whole point of having things like AES in the first place. First you get everyone to agree on an algorithm, then you mandate that algorithm for your own applications. I don't expect them to budge from that, and I don't think it has anything to do with quality. At the point NIST certifies XSalsa20 as FIPS-compliant, they might as well rename it AESbis.

Industry prefers FIPS 140-2 because cryptographic expertise is extremely scarce and, prior to AES, commercial products were choc-a-bloc with broken hand-rolled cryptography. It's a rational decision to delegate selection of primitives to NIST.

I think FIPS 140-2 is aging poorly, but I think that's in part because all cryptographic standards are aging poorly; like, the whole concept: top-down standardization efforts with whole cryptosystems designed by committee have a very poor track record, and probably aren't the right vehicle to improve cryptographic soundness in the industry.

[wolf550e]

NIST FIPS 186-5 (Draft) has Ed25519.

https://csrc.nist.gov/publications/detail/fips/186/5/draft

NIST SP 800-186 (Draft) has the curve definitions. But says only for Ed25519, not for X25519. They have a Weierstrass curve W-25519 that is isomorphic to Curve25519 that might allow using X25519 code, but that's way above my ability to judge. 'tptacek or 'jedisct1 or others will know.

https://csrc.nist.gov/publications/detail/sp/800-186/draft

[tptacek]

I will definitely not know! :)

[loeg]

NIST doesn't like non-NIST ciphers.

[BrandoElFollito]

One of the reasons it is still AD is that the management of users and computers is simplified. You have several layers of admin access etc.

I use Linux since 1993 and love it. All my servers are on Linux. Managing them as a group is a nightmare. I would love to have an umbrella à la AD to have all servers and users unified inside.

[xorcist]

People regularly manage thousands of servers using Puppet or Ansible and version control. The structured text configuration files all UNIX-like software utilize makes this trivial.

The strengths of AD are more related to client software, where many of them uses the policy mechanisms therein for management. Maintaining servers isn't what it does best.

This is a large part of the reason why "the cloud" is pretty much Linux native.

[BrandoElFollito]

I use ansible and salt to provision servers. It works great.

It has limited to no use to manage users and their passwords or authorizations, their control over machines, remote access to a share and zillons other usages you need specialized software for. AD has it all natively.

[xorcist]

People with large environments that needs to be managed homogenously would beg to differ. How else would people manage these things large scale? It's exactly the kind of functionality that this software provides. Expressing rules in code might be radically different to someone used to a product like AD, but the learning curve is pretty quick and it is inherently more powerful.

[BrandoElFollito]

I do not know about products for large environments. Our is arguably medium (around 10,000 servers) and we use solutions where each does its thing, without any reasonable cooperation between the solutions:

- users management? NIS

- configuration management? ansible / salt

- machines management? none (we use a homebrew system based off salt)

- shared storage? NFS

- policies? salt or ansible if they are common to groups of machines, or NIS if for people

etc.

I would love to have a unified tool (similar to what Zen was trying to do 20 years ago) but I do not know any. What AD does for Windows is nice (though I do not use Windows servers but I see their management from the side), Linux was intended to be standalone and this is what there are so many specialized, but disconnected management systems.

[xorcist]

Right, but NIS and NFS are just protocols. You might as well have said DNS and IMAP. There are also services behind those protocols that needs to be managed. This is what Puppet(/Chef/Salt) does.

Take NFS as an example. Let's say all your users with meets certain criteria needs an NFS share named after their user and with an ACL that gives some running software access to drop files there. Maybe this share should be mounted on every machine where this software is present, regardless of who own it or where it runs. You write this rule in Puppet code and then it is guaranteed to be true for everyone forever.

Note that we didn't even need to feed Puppet any new information to do this. All the data required to implement the change was already in the configuration database. (Which is not even a real database but only the result of existing rules.)

Compare with a product such as AD. It doesn't really do the management for you. You can store the data there, but then you need to write a script to implement this change across your server farm. This need to be maintained, and regularly checked re-run to check for changes. Someone has to schedule this. When conditions change, the software which got access changes id, or is installed in another way, the script needs to be maintained accordingly.

Having this version controlled adds another aspect to this. Since everything is text, if you find this rule you can follow the commits and see exactly who brought this into production and when.

It's interesting that you refer to Linux as a standalone system. Linux and other unices have their roots not in single instance "personal computers" but in multi user environments. This is why to this day Linux admins treat everything as text and work mostly by text commands. Others may find this archaic but without this and without version control we could never maintain large homogenous environments. You might say that automation is built into the very way we use these systems.