Ability to run in FIPS compliant mode using aws-lc-rs

[adnan-shoreline]

Describe the feature

aws-sdk-rust can be configured to connect to AWS FIPS endpoints. However, the client side is still not FIPS compliant. AWS now has a FIPS compliant crypto rust library: https://github.com/aws/aws-lc-rs. It would be very useful to have an option to use this library when FIPS is enabled.

Use Case

Needed for FIPS compliance.

Proposed Solution

No response

Other Information

No response

Acknowledgements

• I may be able to implement this feature request
• This feature might incur a breaking change

A note for the community

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[Velfi]

Hey @adnan-shoreline. Thanks for submitting this. We've looked at using aws-lc-rs instead of ring but the fips feature requires Go and cmake to build it. We don't think it's reasonable to require our customers to install CMake and Go just to use Rust, hence why we haven't made the switch yet.

Once those dependencies are removed, then we should be able to "drop in" aws-lc-rs very easily. However, I don't think our team or the aws-lc-rs team will be prioritizing that soon.

[adnan-shoreline]

Thanks @Velfi

In the meantime, is there a workaround that we can follow to achieve fips compliance? We are fine putting in the effort (we have no choice). Thanks!

[adnan-shoreline]

For example, the ability to use native-tls could really help. We can have fips enabled openssl in our environment. If we can make aws-rust-sdk use that for https, that would be really great. Thanks!

[Velfi]

It should be possible for you to create your own connector based on the native-tls crate. We used to include this option but removed it b/c the native-tls crate provides poor forwards compatibility so we didn't want to risk depending on it.

We have a test that creates a native-tls connector here.

The code would look something like this:

use aws_smithy_runtime::client::http::hyper_014::HyperClientBuilder;
use some_aws_sdk::{Client, Config};

/// A `hyper` connector that uses the `native-tls` crate for TLS. To use this in a Smithy client,
/// wrap with a [`HyperClientBuilder`].
pub type NativeTlsConnector = hyper_tls::HttpsConnector<hyper::client::HttpConnector>;

fn native_tls_connector() -> NativeTlsConnector {
    // You'll likely have to load and configure some certs here.
    let tls_connector = hyper_tls::native_tls::TlsConnector::builder()
        .min_protocol_version(Some(hyper_tls::native_tls::Protocol::Tlsv12))
        .build()
        .unwrap_or_else(|e| panic!("error while creating TLS connector: {}", e));
    let mut http_connector = hyper::client::HttpConnector::new();
    http_connector.enforce_http(false);
    hyper_tls::HttpsConnector::from((http_connector, tls_connector.into()))
}

#[tokio::main]
async fn main() {
    let config = Config::builder()
        .http_client(HyperClientBuilder::new().build(native_tls_connector()))
        .endpoint_url(format!("https://{DEFAULT_DOMAIN}:{DEFAULT_PORT}"))
        .build();
    let client = Client::from_conf(config);
    
    // use the SDK
}

[adnan-shoreline]

@Velfi we got it working with native tls. thanks for sharing the example! we're just wondering about the forward compatibility concern you mentioned. does it just mean that if we upgrade aws rust sdk, the native tls related code might not compile and so we'll have to make some code changes? or does it mean that we can have runtime issues? thanks!

[samster25]

Hi @Velfi, we would also love to be able to continue using native-tls (and have been stuck on an older version of the SDK aws-smithy-client=0.55.3) or switch to aws-lc-rs. When running with rustls / ring we hit Sending fatal alert BadRecordMac errors running large scale workloads on S3. However I'll give your workaround a shot with a newer version of the SDK!

[Velfi]

One of the limitations that prevents us from using aws-lc-rs is being worked on: aws/aws-lc-rs#317

[samster25]

It looks like rustls default provider is now aws-lc-rs

Does that make this integration a bit easier?

https://github.com/rustls/rustls/releases/tag/v%2F0.23.0

[jdisanti]

Yeah, that will definitely make it easier. Beyond that, I think there's still some remaining work to do in our other uses of ring that are not TLS to make things FIPS compliant.