FIPS compliant communication encryption

Content Distribution has always provided encryption for most of its communications and uses an advanced FIPS compliant encryption algorithm. The United States Federal Information Processing Standard (FIPS) is a standard that defines security requirements for software used by the U.S. federal government. It stipulates that applications that encrypt any sensitive data should use only a certain set of approved encryption algorithms. Refer to FIPS 140-2.

The product formerly referred to as Nomad has been rebranded as Content Distribution. Although the new name is implemented in the majority of documentation and user interfaces, references to Nomad may still appear in specific tools, scripts, or contexts.

FIPS compliant communication encryption

FIPS encrypts the following types of Content Distribution data sent over a network in peer-to-peer communications, including the following:

  • Election communications

  • Connectionless data transfer

  • Nomad FanOut requests

  • Sign-on/sign-off communication

  • SSD Package Status Requests

  • PBA communications

Encryption types

Content Distribution provides two types of encryption, its default 40-bit RC2 encryption algorithm and FIPS compliant encryption. You can set the encryption type used by Content Distribution during installation or by modifying a Content Distribution registry entry.

1E Clients running different encryption types will be unable to communicate with each other. If you want to use FIPS compliant encryption and earlier versions of Content Distribution are already deployed, you should roll out Content Distribution using its default encryption standard. Once all clients have been upgraded, change the encryption level to FIPS compliant.

Installing Content Distribution with FIPS encryption

FIPS encryption can be set when you enable Content Distribution in the 1E Client. This is done by checking the Use FIPS encryption checkbox on the Content Distribution screen of the 1E Client installer, for more information refer to Deploying 1E Client on Windows.

You can also set FIPS encryption with the MODULE.NOMAD.USEFIPS installer property.

Setting FIPS encryption post-installation

To change Content Distribution's encryption type after installation you can modify the EncryptionType registry value. By default, this is set to 0, for standard Content Distribution encryption, unless the Use FIPS encryption checkbox was checked during installation, in which case it is set to 1.