Friday, November 15, 2019

HPE 5130 switch FIPS and public key based login

Dear all,

We have HPE 5130 switches in our infrastructure. The guy who configured them enabled the FIPS mode. From the document I could find, this is a security level which applies certain rules.

I've asked my colleagues about this FIPS and the answers I got are really vague. However, there seems to be one point where they agree: "don't login in the machine, otherwise, you'll have to connect every 90 days or your user/password will expire".

I searched through the HPE switch documentation and couldn't find this rule explained ("90 days or die").

I also saw that it is possible to configure a key based ssh authentication instead of password but I'm not sure if it's possible with FIPS mode "on".

So my questions are:

  1. Is this "90 days or you die" rule true or not? Can it be changed and keep the FIPS mode "on"?
  2. Can I really configure a FIPS enabled HPE 5130 switch ssh public key authentication?
  3. If the "90 days or you die" rule is true, does it also affect public key authentication (i.e. do I have to connect every 90 days even with public key authentication) ?

And if you're wondering why I didn't contact HPE support on this is because I've been told that we don't have support for these devices :-)

Thanks in advance for your help!



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