Lori MacVittie from F5 Networks provided an analysis of the recent adoption of NIST SSL Deployment Guidelines by the US Government as of January 2011. Since all commercial certificate authorities now issue only 2048-bit keys, the capacity of a server to process SSL is severely impacted and invalidates the general belief that SSL is not computationally expensive.
An implementation of the MD5 cryptographic hashing algorithm for Silverlight has been posted on MSDN by Reid Borsuk. Delay, another MSDN user, has recently posted ComputeFileHashes, a small .NET command-line application that also works on WPF and Silverlight and is helpful to compute MD5, SHA-1, and CRC-32 hashes.
SSL-based security using X509 certificates from certain CA's opens a vulnerability to sites masquerading under a forged X509 certificate, even in a "secure" connection. This was demonstrated recently at the Chaos Conference in Berlin by spoofing a real certificate.
JRuby 1.0.3 is out now. Although a point release, the update is significant because it addresses compatibility issues with Rails 2.0 and other libraries and tools. Meanwhile, some JRuby 1.1 performance improvements get noticed.
Not-Yet-Commons-SSL is an Apache licensed Java library designed to simplify the use of SSL by providing an easy-to-use API along with robust support for a variety of certificate formats and configuration options.
