The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) issued the Federal Information Processing Standard (FIPS) Publication 140-2 to coordinate the requirements and standards for cryptography modules that include both hardware and software components. Federal agencies and departments can validate that the module in use is covered by an existing FIPS 140-2 certificate that specifies the exact module name, hardware, software, firmware, and/or applet version numbers. The cryptographic modules are produced by the private sector or open source communities for use by the U.S. government and other regulated industries (such as financial and health-care institutions) that collect, store, transfer, share and disseminate sensitive but unclassified (SBU) information.

FIPS 140-2 defines four levels of security, ‘Level 1’ to ‘Level 4’. LoadMaster products have an overall compliance level of Level 1 with the FIPS 140-2 standard.

Document Purpose

The FIPS and non-FIPS LoadMaster products are very similar. For details on most of the LoadMaster functionality, you can refer to the LoadMaster documentation. The purpose of this document is to describe some functionality that is specific to the FIPS LoadMaster.