Share FIPS 140-3 on EKS: Bottlerocket OS and KMS Hardware Modules

Copy link

June 13, 2026

FIPS 140-3 on EKS: Bottlerocket OS and KMS Hardware Modules

16 minutes

Enforcing FIPS 140-3 compliance on an EKS cluster means locking down every layer — from the OS to the key management hardware — and this episode walks through exactly how Bottlerocket and AWS KMS make that possible.

You'll learn:

Why Bottlerocket OS ships with a FIPS-validated kernel and how to verify its cryptographic module status at node bootstrap

How AWS KMS custom key stores backed by CloudHSM satisfy the hardware security module requirement under FIPS 140-3

Enforcing TLS 1.2+ with FIPS-approved cipher suites across EKS control plane and data plane communication

IAM and pod-level controls to ensure workloads only call FIPS-compliant API endpoints

Common audit failures — weak cipher negotiation, unvalidated node images — and how to catch them before an assessor does

Keywords: FIPS 140-3 EKS, Bottlerocket FIPS compliance, AWS KMS CloudHSM, EKS security hardening, FIPS validated Kubernetes

🎧 Listen, then go deeper — DevOps & Cloud interview-prep ebooks at DevOpsInterview.Cloud

...more

View all episodes

By https://DevOpsInterview.Cloud