Oracle open-sources Jipher for FIPS-compliant SSL

Oracle is open-sourcing Jipher, a Java Cryptography Architecture (JCA) provider built for security and performance that has been used by the company’s cloud platform, the company said on November 7.

Jipher was developed for environments with FIPS (Federal Information Processing Standards) 140 requirements. Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) has seen dramatic performance improvements with Jipher, according to Oracle. The technology will be offered via open source through the OpenJDK to support Project Panama-based Java applications. Project Panama is intended to develop interconnections between the JVM and native code.

The Jipher provider supports algorithms allowed by FIPS, including the OpenSSL 3.0 FIPS module, providing competitive performance to Bouncy Castle or default JDK providers. JCA features a provider architecture and APIs for digital signatures, message digests (ashes), certificates and certificate validation, encryption (symmetric/asymmetric block/stream ciphers), key generation and management, and secure random number generation.

Also in the network security realm, Oracle on November 7 said it plans to release the Oracle Zero Trust Packet Routing Platform based on an initiative to develop a new open standard for data and network security, intended to help organizations better protect data in distributed IT environments. Oracle will collaborate with other organizations across industries to develop this standard.

Oracle this week also said it will contribute $3 million in credits on Ampere Arm-based hardware per year for three years to support CNCF (Cloud Native Computing Foundation) on OCI. The contribution is intended to advance an OCI commitment to cloud-native computing by combining cloud-native Ampere compute infrastructure with a field of open source projects hosted by the CNCF for cloud-native services.