Defective sign & encrypt vis-a-vis SAML?

[Jeremy Epstein <jepstein@webmethods.com>]

I'm sure many of you have heard about Don Davis' moderately controversial
paper on defective sign & encrypt in S/MIME, XML Signature, and other
standards (see
http://www.usenix.org/publications/library/proceedings/usenix01/davis.html
for the paper).  It's not that the crypto algorithms are broken, it's that
they're being used in broken ways that allow surreptitious forwarding, among
other things.

Has anyone given any thought to the way SAML specifies signing & encrypting
of assertions and other stuff?  This has been discussed briefly on the XML
Encryption list...

Or is it too soon to think about such a thing?

--Jeremy

-----------------------------------------------------------
Jeremy Epstein                          voice: 703-460-5852
Director, Product Security & Performance  FAX: 703-460-5999
webMethods, Inc.                         cell: 703-989-8907
Fairfax Virginia             email: jepstein@webMethods.com
-----------------------------------------------------------