Enhanced cryptography SP 800-131a support

Starting in IBM® Netezza® release 7.1.0.0, you can enable support for cryptographic standard SP 800-131a.

Special Publication 800-131a (SP 800-131a) is an information security standard of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). SP 800-131a is a recommendation that provides guidance for the use of stronger cryptographic keys and connection settings. IBM Netezza offers the ability to configure an appliance to support the SP 800-131a recommendations. If you enable enhanced cryptography support, you must adhere to specific requirements for the host keys that you use for cryptography, for the authentication modes that are used for all connections to the Netezza databases, and for the digitally signing the audit history configuration and database (if you use the audit history feature).

If you plan to implement SP 800-131a cryptography on your Netezza systems, see the section in the IBM Netezza System Administrator’s Guide that describes important host prerequisites including Red Hat OS versions, and how to enable the SP 800-131a support. After you enable and create enhanced crypto objects, you cannot downgrade to a release before 7.1.0.0 until after you disable crypto support and drop those crypto objects. The downgrade process returns an error if it detects these objects on your Netezza host.