FIPS 140-3 is the current U.S. government standard for cryptographic modules. If your systems handle sensitive data for federal contracts, health records, or regulated markets, meeting this standard is not optional. It defines strict requirements for design, implementation, and validation of cryptographic modules.
GPG (GNU Privacy Guard) is a widely used open-source encryption tool that supports OpenPGP standards. Out of the box, GPG is powerful and flexible, but it is not automatically FIPS 140-3 validated. To align GPG with FIPS 140-3, you must ensure the cryptographic algorithms and libraries it depends on have been tested and validated against FIPS 140-3 requirements by the Cryptographic Module Validation Program (CMVP).
The certification step is critical. Many deploy GPG with standard builds that use non-FIPS-approved algorithms. For compliance, your build must be linked against a FIPS 140-3 validated crypto library, such as a certified version of OpenSSL or libgcrypt configured in FIPS mode. The operating environment also matters—CMVP validation applies to specific OS, hardware, and library versions. Changing any of these may require revalidation.