Problems decrypting documents, version 5.3.6.1-19.el7

Greetings all.

I’m a linux admin and have a user who’s running CentOS 7.6 with the above version of LibreOffice. I have just upgrade the user’s laptop, and we noticed that he could not open any encrypted documents on the new system, old system was CentOS 7.6 also, he’s just getting nicer hardware. At first we just looked at old documents copied over from his previous system, but after some tinkering we discovered that he can make new encrypted documents with very simple passwords, but we can’t open any of those either. Basically, LibreOffice says the password isn’t correct, and prompts again unless cancelled.

I have about 20 other desktops (including my own) all running the same configuration (built from kickstart and config managed by puppet), and I have seen no issues with document encryption. I’m not sure how many of my users encrypt their docs, but I have a few that and they open fine on my machine, but not on his.

I was hoping for a shove in the right direction on how/where to dig deeper on this. I did attempt to run writer and calc from the command prompt with a --backtrace flag, but the gdb log didn’t produce anything interesting.

Any ideas?

UPDATE 01/03/2019

I believe I have discovered the root cause. Our workstations are, by policy, required to use FIPS. My workstation indeed temporarily has FIPS disabled because I was troubleshooting another application issue that turned out to also be FIPS related. I also reconfigured the laptop of the gentlemen which encountered this issue to not use FIPS and can confirm he is now able to open all encrypted documents… even those we were able to create yesterday.

I will register with the bugzilla and submit a bug report, then update this post with a link.

Do you mean enabling/disabling a FIPS-140 chip?