Problem with FIPS Validated Cryptographic Algorithms

Question

I am running Visual Studio 2008 Version 9.0.30729.1 SP with .NET 3.5 SP 1 under Windows XP Pro Version 2002 SP 3 with an Intel Core 2 Duo E8400 3 GHz processor.

I am developing a C# WPF application that uses the Microsoft Patterns & Practices group's Composite Application Library (CAL).

I am getting the following compliation error in XAML:

"MC1000: This implementation is not part of the Windows platform FIPS validated cryptographic algorithms."

I have found a hotfix that is supposed to fix this in Microsoft Knowledge Base aritcle 935434. However, the installer for this hotfix reports the following error:

"The upgrade patch cannot be installed by the Windows Installer service because the program to be upgraded may be missing, or the upgrade patch may update a different version of the program. Verify that the program to be upgraded exists on your computer and that you have the correct upgrade patch."

The page for the hotfix lists .NET 3.0 as a prerequisite. Though I'm working with .Net 3.5, my machine does have .NET 3.0 installed as well. I would therefore expect this hotfix to install. It was my hope that even though the hotfix is targeted at .NET 3.0, it would nonetheless solve my problem.

In any event, I cannot install the hotfix. Does anybody have any alternate suggestions on how I can get past the "This implementation is not part of..." compilation error I'm seeing?

Thanks, Dave

Answer 1

I wonder if FIPS compliance checking is turned on on your machine. Here is a post that I had written a while back that talks about turning it off and why you might be getting this error messages. Basically FIPS is a US federal government standard for security and encryption. Based on it, some encryption algorithms will not run on your machine, if your machine is running in FIPS compliance mode. Easy fix in that case is to turn off FIPS compliance checking. The right fix is to pick the correct encryption algorithm.

Here is my post: http://blog.aggregatedintelligence.com/2007/10/fips-validated-cryptographic-algorithms.html and this one: http://blog.aggregatedintelligence.com/2009/08/cryptographic-algorithms-and-net.html