National RA Newsletter – 16/07/2025 – Group 2
Oberthur Middleware – Required on all machines
Oberthur middleware is required on all machines, as soon as possible. Failure to deploy the middleware will result in authentication and prescription issues for organisations.
More details available here:
- https://digital.nhs.uk/services/care-identity-service/applications-and-services/technical-services/middleware
- https://digital.nhs.uk/services/care-identity-service/latest-news/action-required-by-it-teams-to-support-ongoing-use-of-care-identity-service
TLS 1/1.1 – Access impacting changes
To ensure sensitive authentication data is properly protected in line with National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) and Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) guidance and best practice, we stated that protective measures will be used to stop all use of deprecated TLS from July 2025.
IT teams need to:
- update to the latest version of Identity Agent
- if this is not possible, apply registry settings to legacy versions of Identity Agent
Failure to update could result in authentication issues and service disruption.
Further information and details of planned outages using TLS1/1.1 is available here:
https://digital.nhs.uk/services/care-identity-service/latest-news/outages-for-tls-1.0-1.1
Series 4,5,6 Smartcard Deprecation
Reminder – S4,5,6 should no longer be used for Prescription signing
It is expected that in Q3 2025, Series 4,5,6 smartcards will no longer be able to authenticate to national systems and services.
It is essential all actively used Series 4,5,6 smartcards are removed from active use as soon as possible to avoid loss of access.
Directory of Service (DoS)
From end of July, DoS users will require a CIS profile and authenticator to access the service, as well as a link DoS account. For more information, please review this DoS support page:
Windows 10 Support – Ending
Microsoft are ending extended support for Microsoft Windows 10 in October 2025. The NHS England IAM team will be stopping support for Windows 10 machines in line with Microsoft. It is recommended that these machines are updated to Windows 11 as soon as possible.
Reminders
It is expected all users with an RA role have an active email address on their CIS profile.
Please take note of the imminent RA software changes that may affect your organisation.
🔧 What You Need to Do – Identify any affected device and get the software updated ASAP (i.e. Oberthur Middleware and NHS Identity Agent v2.4.6.0 – recommended and v2.4.5.0 – supported. (See attached guide).
Failure to update could result in authentication issues and service disruption.