Assurance

["Joe St Sauver" <>]

Dave commented:

#Well, my concern is more about Protected Channels and TLS.  After Dec 31,
#SHA1 is no good for the digital signatures used in TLS.  Even if you don't
#consider HMAC to be a "digital signature" you still wind up with the
#problem of SP 800-131A listing SHA1 as 80 bit and 80 bit for HMAC
#generation expires Dec 31.  Therefore, your TLS Connection by the
#user-agent to the Identity Provider needs to be using at least TLS1.2 with
#a SHA2 HMAC which in my testing wasn't available wide-spread in browsers
#until just this summer.  The result of us not being able to still use TLSv1
#after Dec 31 will mean massive breakage of users who are not running recent
#browsers.

Since folks are interested in TLS, let me suggest two exceptionally
important articles that were published today:

-- US and UK spy agencies defeat privacy and security on the Internet
   
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/sep/05/nsa-gchq-encryption-codes-security

-- N.S.A. Foils Much Internet Encryption
   
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/06/us/nsa-foils-much-internet-encryption.html

The crypto world that we woke up to this morning is not the crypto world
we live in this afternoon.

Regards,

Joe