> Our goal is to share this implementation with others in the Go community who have the same requirement, and to merge this capability into upstream Go as soon as possible.
"Embrace, extend, and extinguish" (EEE),[1] also known as "embrace, extend, and exterminate",[2] is a phrase that the U.S. Department of Justice found[3] was used internally by Microsoft[4] to describe its strategy for entering product categories involving widely used open standards, extending those standards with proprietary capabilities, and using the differences to strongly disadvantage its competitors.
Please see the Wiki article for the full deal including footnotes.
You would be interested in this if you need the 'crypto' library to work in a FIPS 140-2 compliant way. You can switch on / off this mode by setting the runtime variable GOFIPS=1 before running your Go program [1]. Nice.
It looks like the Go community officially has no plans to support FIPS140-2 any time, so I'm glad to see this alternative.
The general theme is that you need to be using approved ciphers and you need to have your key management code certified by some external entity. It is an exhausting process ;)
FIPS is terrible, except that sometimes if you shout "FIPS 140 compliance for US gov contracts" enough into the corporate hierarchy you eventually get the budget to implement any security whatsoever, even though it's just FIPS.
If you're not trying to get US government contracts that require it, don't bother with FIPS. It mandates older algorithms; they're mostly secure enough but not as performant and there are a lot more footguns. FIPS 140-3 fixed a few, but not all.
There's a difference between FIPS approved algorithms, which are actually pretty broad and well-selected these days, and FIPS validated implementations, which are at best a PITA and often actively harmful. Very rarely do you actually need a FIPS-validated implementation.
>Microsoft's security reputation is so flawed, that some parts simply must be intentional, or coerced.
They are a lot better than they used to be. They went through a trial by fire in the 90s and early 00s and came through for the better.
It's worth noting that classified computer systems in the military-industrial complex run Windows, and not Linux, nor do they run the security cosplay that is OpenBSD.
Jonathan Blow ranted about the susceptibility of open source to supply chain attacks from state actors, which discussion recently became germane again in light of the xz backdoor.
What he didn't discuss was how vulnerable proprietary vendors (including, but by no means limited to, Microsoft) are to "rubber-hose vulnerability injection".
Anyway, it's good to see Microsoft actually participating in the open source process.
https://github.com/golang/go/tree/dev.boringcrypto/misc/bori...
But it looks dead for some time.
However https://github.com/golang-fips/go sprung up to take it's place.
I wonder why microsoft prefers to maintain it's own in entirety rather than share a piece of the burden.