THE LATEST RELEASE

2.4.2 was published on 04.03.2018

DOCUMENTATION OF THE RELEASE

can be read from:

IMPORTANT NOTE ON OPENJDK

with introduction of latest Jetty HTTP server (used by Unity) it was observed that Firefox browser have troubles connecting to Unity launched on some of the OpenJDK distributions (e.g. Fedora). This is due to disabling EC TLS ciphers in affected OpenJDK. In case of troubles please use Oracle Java RE.

Release 2.4.0 brings many significant new features. The main theme was to allow for quicker and easier setup in case of typical authentication integration scenarios.

The highlights are:

• Unity now contains two predefined attribute type sets: common and eduPerson. The common set includes nearly 50 attribute types which should completely fulfill needs of majority of deployments. The set includes attributes with sensible settings which are counterparts of all commonly found user attributes. This set is loaded by default (via configuration module). The eduPerson set is not loaded by default. It includes couple of attributes of the eduPerson schema which are not found in the common set. You can freely edit and/or remove those standard attributes from AdminUI. What is more it is now possible to export and import attribute types to/from JSON, as well as (re-)import attribute types from the always available predefined sets described above.
• For each supported external OAuth identity provider (e.g. Dropbox, Facebook, GitHub, Google, …) a complete mapping of attributes to Unity standard attributes is now provided as a ready to use system input translation profile. Thanks to it the configuration of those providers requires only 3 parameters: type, client id and client secret. We have cleaned the providers, updated them to use current APIs. And LinkedIn was added to the set of supported providers together with… Unity – so that one Unity instance can be easily configured to use other one.
• There is also a symmetric change: Unity offers ready to use output profiles which translates the Unity attributes to the naming and syntax used by a protocol. For instance there is a default OpenIdConnect output profile which makes Unity returning standard OIDC attributes without any additional configuration effort.
• Of course not always default mappings (both in and out) are fully sufficient. We have enhanced the translation profiles subsystem so now one profile may include (and optionally overwrite) definitions of other profile. This is especially useful to create a customized/enhanced version of any of the standard profiles.
• Most of the development time in this release was spent on something bringing a little value: update to the new major release of Vaadin 8 – a web UI foundation used by Unity. This change enables many further planned developments, but already now you should be able to see some difference:
  • all icons were unified to font ones from a single set,
  • ‘hamburger menus’ are used in few places to hide rarely used operation icons,
  • the translation profile edit screen was improved: is using dense formatting and rules can be dragged to easily control their order.
• Unity now ships with a default, system password credential with reasonable security settings. It is used as a default credential for the initial admin user and always when creating admin user in emergency (lost admin account). There are also default system credential requirements provided.
• Date & time attribute syntax were added.
• User import functionality which so far was only possible on 3rd party query SAML/SOAP endpoint now is available on all IdP like endpoint (SAML, OAuth). It can be plugged just before output profile execution to import additional information about the user by a query to external system. Currently local OS users store and LDAP are supported, but we may add more providers in future.
• There were few enhancements in the output profiles:
  • OAuth client’s attributes can be used in expressions
  • it is possible to redirect the user to external URL instead of completing the regular protocol flow.

There were also many other, smaller improvements including: attribute values are never cut on UI, it is possible to configure Unity to be invisible login proxy (no UI presented), confirmation link validity is configurable now.

Note we also added a new – SMS – notification channel. It is not very useful so far (one can use it for sending registration request related notifications) but will be fundamental element of the features coming in the next release.

Here you can download previous versions from the series and read their documentation:

RELEASE 2.4.1:     DOWNLOAD     DOCUMENTATION

RELEASE 2.4.0:     DOWNLOAD     DOCUMENTATION