February Update

Created by Scott Cantor
Feb 11, 2020
2 min read

It's been a busy month for the project primarily to get the expected beta release of the Identity Provider V4.0 done. Testing to this point has not been extensive, but the early returns from within the team have been positive and the final release is expected by early March at the latest. Upgrades should be very easy for the majority of deployers.

The lifecycle of support for V3 is essentially a foregone conclusion at this point because Spring 4 is end-of-life at the end of 2020. We don't have any compelling reason to abandon security support for V3 any sooner than that, so V3 will be supported through the remainder of this calendar year.

I undertook a mini-project to blitz a port of the OIDC extension and we are on track to produce a compatible extension along with the IdP release. After a short discussion, we agreed to forego significant breaking changes to this code for now and leave things largely as they have been for this release.

For clarity, since this is a period of transition:

  • The code in GitHub is the V3-compatible extension. Issues with it can continue to be reported via GitHub if desired.
  • The V4-compatible extension is largely the same but has been moved into our Git repository and will be distributed via our download site. The documentation remains in the GitHub wiki, but we are using our Jira instance for bug reporting and patch submission.
  • The V5 extension when it comes will include a number of breaking changes so that the code packages can be renamed and configuration layout changed, and the documentation will be moved into our wiki. At that point we will be in a position to fully support the extension to minimize breakage in the same way we have done for the rest of the feature set.

In parallel with the beta effort, work has begun on the next SP update, V3.1. This feature upgrade is primarily focused on addressing XSRF in two areas:

  • Providing a fix for the SameSite issue in a Safari-compatible way
  • Adding request/response correlation along with an option to block unsolicited SSO

The SameSite work is complete and will explicitly designate a subset of SP cookies as SameSite=None, with an optional setting to add a second non-SameSite cookie to support broken browsers for hopefully a temporary period of time. It will also be optionally possible to support cross-site use of SP sessions, when XSRF is a "feature" and not a bug.

The correlation work is underway, but is being carefully implemented to maintain compatibility so it will be an optional feature for security conscious deployers to turn on.

There are a few other odds and ends to complete for the SP release, but we're moving aggressively to complete that work as soon as possible so it's quite likely March will see both IdP and SP releases.

We have a significant queue of work items for the IdP once V4 ships, primarily authentication-related, so the roadmap should be getting cleaned up and clarified once we can take stock of things.