Operating OCSP Service in FIPS 201 Compliant Mode

FIPS 201 (Federal Information Processing Standards Publication 201) is a United States federal government standard that specifies Personal Identity Verification (PIV) requirements for Federal employees and contractors.

FIPS 201 places specific requirements on OCSP Responders as specified below:

OCSP [RFC6960] status responders shall be implemented as a supplementary certificate status mechanism.
The OCSP status responses are digitally signed to support authentication and integrity using a public key and hash algorithm at least as large as that used to sign the certificate.

Note: It is the role of the ADSS Server operator to ensure that they configure an OCSP response signing key and hash algorithm that is at least as large as, or larger than, the key and hash algorithm size used by the CA which issued the target certificate (i.e. certificate being validated). For further details on how to configure this within the OCSP Service see this page: Step 3 - Registering Trusted CAs for OCSP Service

The OCSP message can also be signed with a larger public key or hash algorithm that satisfies the requirements for signing new PIV information, as specified in Table 3-3 of SP 800-78-1:

Signature Generation Date	Public Key Algorithms and Key Sizes	Hash Algorithms	Padding Scheme
After 12/31/2010	RSA (2048, 3072, or 4096 bits)	SHA-256	PKCS #1 v1.5, PSS
	ECDSA (Curve P-256)	SHA-256	N/A
	ECDSA (Curve P-384)	SHA-384	N/A

The object identifiers specified in Table 3-4 in SP800-78-1 must be used in CRLs and OCSP messages to identify the signature algorithm:

Signature Algorithm	Object Identifier
RSA with SHA-1 and PKCS v1.5 padding	sha1WithRSAEncryption ::= {iso(1) member-body(2) us(840) rsadsi(113549) pkcs(1) pkcs-1(1) 5}
RSA with SHA-256 and PKCS v1.5 padding	sha256WithRSAEncryption ::= {iso(1) member-body(2) us(840) rsadsi(113549) pkcs(1) pkcs-1(1) 11}
RSA with SHA-256 and PSS padding	id-RSASSA-PSS ::= {iso(1) member-body(2) us(840) rsadsi(113549) pkcs(1) pkcs-1(1) 10}
ECDSA with SHA-256	ecdsa-with-SHA256 ::= {iso(1) member-body(2) us(840) ansi-X9-62(10045) signatures(4) ecdsa-with-SHA2 (3) 2}
ECDSA with SHA-384	ecdsa-with-SHA384 ::= {iso(1) member-body(2) us(840) ansi-X9-62(10045) signatures(4) ecdsa-with-SHA2 (3) 3}

The cryptographic module used for signing [OCSP responses] shall be validated to FIPS 140-2 with an overall Security Level 2 (or higher).

The ADSS Server administrator can configure the OCSP service to meet all of the above requirements. ADSS Server has been interoperability tested with a range of FIPS 140-2 Level 2+ hardware cryptographic modules from various suppliers. Any FIPS 140-2 Level 2+ hardware security module that implements the PKCS#11 interface should work with ADSS Server. For further details on how to configure the FIPS 140-2 cryptographic module see this section of the manual: Creating a New Hardware Crypto Profile.