I am using HMACSHA256 for message authentication in a web-farm environment.
Within the web-farm each machine has the same machine key, so the ViewState will work across machines, however, I need to do HMAC message authentication which will work across machines, so I figured that since all machines use the same machine key, there should be a way to derive a key from that to use as the HMAC key.
I notice that as of .NET 4.0 there is the MachineKey class, however, I am stuck with using .NET 3.5, and this is unavailable to me.
Is there a way to get some sort key that is the same on all machines without generating my own, for use in an ASP.NET 3.5 environment?
Edit
I don't actually need the machine key itself, just the validation key that is derived from the machine key (or equivalent).