Migrating to Ubuntu, End of Year Break

[Fiumara, Gregory P. (Fed)]

Hello fingerprint evaluation stakeholders,

Operating System

You may have heard that the CentOS Project will cease support for CentOS 8 at the end of 2021. We will be migrating evaluations from CentOS 8 to Ubuntu 20.04.3 LTS (Focal Fossa). The ISO file can be downloaded directly from NIST or any Ubuntu mirror. Updated validation packages will be available for our evaluations in the coming weeks, with the goal of requiring the new operating system no later than February 2022. For ELFT participants, a validation package is available now in the "ubuntu" branch on GitHub.

A notable exception to this is MINEX III. This evaluation runs on CentOS 7 (not 8) and requires repeated execution of comparison algorithms to form the interoperable matrix. The operating system migration plan for this evaluation is still pending, but will likely align with the upcoming revisions of FIPS 201 and NIST SP 800-76, which may otherwise reset the interoperable matrix of algorithms.

End of Year Break

The team will be on holiday during the second half of December. We will make our best effort to evaluate MINEX, PFT, and SlapSeg submissions that are successfully validated by 13 December.

Thanks,

-Greg