Relevant Product: Signature Manager Exchange Edition
WARNING! From 1st April 2021 Exclaimer will no longer be renewing any Software Maintenance Agreement (SMA) for Mail Disclaimers.
Please be assured that the Exclaimer Support team will provide support until your SMA is active.
However, we recommend that you contact the Exclaimer Sales team to discuss your requirements for an upgrade to Signature Management Exchange Edition or Exclaimer Cloud - Signatures for Exchange.
Scenario
You are using Exclaimer Signature Manager Exchange Edition or Exclaimer Mail Disclaimers.
You have enabled the Federal Information Processing Standard (FIPS) and you notice that no signatures are appended to messages and you receive an error similar to this in the Exclaimer console:
Reason
Microsoft no longer recommends the use of the Federal Information Processing Standard (FIPS) mode.
One of the major reasons is:
FIPS defines cryptographic algorithms approved for use by U.S. Federal government computer systems. If you enable FIPS mode in Windows, this means that only FIPS-validated cryptographic algorithms will be used.
However, the .NET framework (used by most Microsoft applications, including Exclaimer Signature Manager Exchange Edition and Exclaimer Mail Disclaimers) supplies both FIPS and non-FIPS versions of the same cryptographic algorithms.
If FIPS mode is enabled, the non-FIPS algorithms throw an error and the application fails - this is what’s happening in this scenario.
(Non-FIPS versions are available and are used more widely; typically, they are faster).
Resolution
As a Microsoft Gold Partner, Exclaimer always advises the best practices and recommendations of Microsoft: therefore, we advise against the use of FIPS.