Federal Information Processing Standards is a set of standards that describe the handling and processing of information within governmental agencies, systems and in particular cryptographic algorithms can get FIPS certification.

The Maverick API itself is not FIPS certified, however third-party FIPS-certified JCE's can be utilised within the API just like any other JCE provider.

IBM's JDK 1.4.2 provides the most comprehensive security offering for the Java 2 platform at the time of this FAQ's release. It includes several IBM-specific security providers including two FIPS 140-2 compliant modules for JCE and JSSE called, IBMJCEFIPS and IBMJSSEFIPS; the IBMJCEFIPS module is implemented as a JCE provider to support FIPS-approved cryptographic operations through JCE framework APIs.

The Sun version of JDK Version 1.4.2 does not have FIPS-approved cryptographic modules.