Deployment Guide

NOTE: Under certain unusual circumstances, it is possible for the fips enable command to indicate a failure.
• This failure occurs if any of the self-tests fail when you enable FIPS mode.
• This failure occurs if there were existing SSH/Telnet sessions that could not be closed successfully in a reasonable amount of time.
In general, this failure can occur if a user at a remote host is in the process of establishing an SSH session to the local system, and
has been prompted to accept a new host key or to enter a password, but is not responding to the request. Assuming this failure is a
transient condition, attempting to enable FIPS mode again should be successful.
To enable FIPS mode, use the following command.
• Enable FIPS mode from a console port.
CONFIGURATION
fips mode enable
The following warning message displays:
WARNING: Enabling FIPS mode will close all SSH/Telnet connections, restart those servers, and
destroy all configured host keys. Proceed (y/n) ?
Generating Host-Keys
The following describes hot-key generation.
When you enable or disable FIPS mode, the system deletes the current public/private host-key pair, terminates any SSH sessions that are
in progress (deleting all the per-session encryption key information), actually enables/tests FIPS mode, generates new host-keys, and re-
enables the SSH server (assuming it was enabled before enabling FIPS).
For more information, refer to the SSH Server and SCP Commands section in the Security chapter of the Dell Networking OS Command
Line Reference Guide.
Monitoring FIPS Mode Status
To view the status of the current FIPS mode (enabled/disabled), use the following commands.
• Use either command to view the status of the current FIPS mode.
show fips status
show system
Example of the show fips status Command
Example of the show system Command
Dell#show fips status
FIPS Mode : Enabled
for the system using the show system command.
Dell#show system
Stack MAC : 00:01:e8:8a:ff:0c
Reload Type : normal-reload [Next boot : normal-reload]
-- Unit 0 --
Unit Type : Management Unit
Status : online
Next Boot : online
Required Type : XML - 52-port GE/TE/FG (SE)
Current Type : XML - 52-port GE/TE/FG (SE)
Master priority : 0
Hardware Rev : 3.0
Num Ports : 64
Up Time : 7 hr, 3 min
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FIPS Cryptography