fips enablement on cloud instances

[ani-sinha]

I see cc_ubuntu_pro.py enables fips mode for Ubuntu pro as per the doc here. This is run on first boot since the frequency is PER_INSTANCE. For centos/fedora/rhel, we would want to implement something similar to enable fips mode for cloud instances. However, I have a question. How do you ensure that cc_ubuntu_pro is run before say ssh keys are generated by cc_ssh.py (which is also a per instance module)? If the ssh keys are generated once the instance comes up on first boot but before fips is enabled (which would not be enabled until a reboot happens), the ssh keys that are generated might be non-fips complaint. Therefore, after reboot with fips mode ON, these keys might require to be deleted. Similarly there might be other configurations that happen before the reboot that are non-fips complaint and needs to be reverted after the reboot with fips enabled happens. How does canonical handle this situation?

[rjhornsby]

I'm not sure about how to properly handle it in cloud-init, but for all of the reasons you stated, we enable FIPS during the image build through our packer scripts. This happens long before cloud-init ever runs, so it avoids all of the sort of race condition problems you're describing.

We don't use the AWS (for example) provided Linux images because things like the simple disk layout is wrong for us, and this is very difficult to correct after an instance is built. As to your question, we also build our own rhel/rocky images so that we can ensure FIPS is enabled as early as possible.

[rjhornsby]

It looks like there's a big warning (now?) about when you should enable FIPS on RHEL 9, so it might be best as discussed above to not delay until cloud-init to enable FIPS. This is the message I saw while building a new Rocky 9 AMI with packer a few days ago:

==> virtualbox-iso.rocky-ami-fips: Configuring FIPS mode
==> virtualbox-iso.rocky-ami-fips: *****************************************************************
==> virtualbox-iso.rocky-ami-fips: * PRESS CONTROL-C WITHIN 15 SECONDS TO ABORT...                 *
==> virtualbox-iso.rocky-ami-fips: *                                                               *
==> virtualbox-iso.rocky-ami-fips: * ENABLING FIPS MODE AFTER THE INSTALLATION IS NOT RECOMMENDED. *
==> virtualbox-iso.rocky-ami-fips: * THIS OPERATION CANNOT BE UNDONE.                              *
==> virtualbox-iso.rocky-ami-fips: * REINSTALL WITH fips=1 INSTEAD.                                *
==> virtualbox-iso.rocky-ami-fips: *****************************************************************