General information

Unity 3.5.0 release brings couple of significant new features.

 

Important SAML handling enhancements

There were multiple updates to the SAML subsystem:

  • proper support for HTTP-Redirect binding signatures (both verification and generation)
  • support for validating signatures which do not specify signing key in it, for peers that have multiple trusted keys
  • fixes in SOAP-Binding metadata produced by Unity

 

Login-less support for FIDO/WebAuthn

Login-less support for FIDO means not typing a password, but also… not typing a username. The feature is available only for devices capable to store site data on it and in general is recommended for biometric keys only. Otherwise user needs to provide a PIN – instead of username.

 

Major logging improvements

In this release we improved Unity logging a lot. Until now it was quite hard to setup decent logging in Unity: default level was too silent, while global DEBUG was way too talkative. We applied numerous changed to improve the situation:

  • Default logging levels were adjusted. By default Unity will log much more information, all important facts. Using Unity with default logging configuration should be fine for the most of cases.
  • No logging facility logs under the root ‘unity.server’ category directly. All loggers that previously used it were moved to use a more specific sub category (e.g. ”unity.server.audit’). That way ‘unity.server’ root category is only responsible for setting a default for all loggers, and each subsystem logging can be flexible reconfigured.
  • Many new logging categories were added, improving granularity of loggers.
  • We have added diagnostic context. Client IP, user’s entity id, endpoint name can be logged with every log entry that has those settings set in their context.

 

MySQL 8 supported

As MySQL 8 reserved one new keyword which was used in Unity’s DB schema a fix was needed to make Unity working on MySQL 8. It is supported since this release.

 

Upgrade from 3.4

Upgrade from previous release should not be problematic. Internal data migration is not performed in this release. There might be need to update your logging configuration file – details are provided in the Unity manual, in the upgrading chapter.