Beginning March 31, 2022, ISO New England’s list of cipher suites available to access the production Standard Market Design (SMD) homepage will be updated to the list of ciphers below. Ciphers for both Transport Layer Security (TLS) version 1.2 and TLS 1.3 will be available. The TLS protocol is used to encrypt data communications submitted and received so that the data is secure and protected from third party access.
All applications listed on the production Standard Market Design (SMD) homepage such as eMarket (Bids & Offers), eFTR, Meter Reading uploads, and the Internal Bilateral Transaction user interfaces are affected.
An SMD sandbox environment has been available for testing and its ciphers are presently identical to the list of ciphers that will be available in production at go-live. Most modern browsers refresh the list of ciphers automatically, provided they are kept current; however, we recommend that participants who use custom client code or automated processes use the sandbox environment to test, and update as needed, their systems.
As communicated previously, ISO New England will eventually phase out TLS 1.2. A date for this transition has not yet been set and is not planned to occur in 2022.