Identity Server 2020.2 is released today, including SSO 8.6 and CustomerID 5.6.

At the core, software development should be incremental, where small changes are delivered quickly, with high quality and continual improvement in mind. There should be several elements: the correction of some deviations, some feature improvements, some maintenance and ideally a new feature or two. Inside this release we have a little of all of these things for you, and we have focused on a new feature. Check out the release notes here for an in depth view of things. In brief, we have ensured our internal retooling functions well – and it does – we’re pleased with the ability to deliver code improvements quickly in a highly automated and testable manner. During this development cycle we delivered several patches to resolve deviations in our CustomerID application which also helped us to iron out the last wrinkles in the new CI. This allowed us to accommodate the security improvement required by Suomi.fi and create the SSO 8.5.1 patch in very short order.

Working with several customers, we elected to focus on Time-based One-Time Password (TOTP) as an addition to our many authentication methods. Many of our customers create their own UI and already have the ability or desire to create their own Quick Response (QR) code, which can ease user onboarding, although you can still offer the secret as a text string. So we set-about the task of code creation inside the SSO application, including the API control functions and logging functions essential to any SSO authentication.

Continuing to the end of 2020

Within the product, we are going to do some incremental improvements in the last months of 2020. There are some additional tooling changes that will ensure that we can bring updated third-party libraries into every release we make. We are also adding a section into the Release Notes, as requested, covering the life-cycle management of external components (like which Tomcat is in use, when will PostgreSQL being updated next etc). In late 2019, the OpenID foundation finalised their CIBA (Client Initiated Backchannel Authentication) method into CIBA Core 1.0. So while we had implemented a pre-spec version of CIBA in the summer of 2018, we now need to make a couple of small changes to our Ubisecure Backchannel Authentication Adaptor (UBAA) to be Core 1.0 compliant. We expect to integrate several new external authenticators via UBAA in the first half of 2021 and then open the adaptor methodology up to all of you – easy integrations to SSO is coming soon! In the next week or so, we will publish our 2020.3 pre-release notes – the goals and intentions of the team for the final development cycle of 2020.

This iteration, IDS 2020.2, has been tightly focused and IDS 2020.3 will be very focused as well. Additionally, we are working on the scoping and predictability of our engineering as well as adding communication of upcoming development plans; for example pre-release notes as details against top line roadmap items and life-cycle management found on the release notes. The goal is to ensure that we can understand your needs and dependably place them into a development timeline. Coupled with the new CI and automated release testing we have done over the prior year, I am confident that we will continue to support and serve our customers the best possible code and new feature additions on a predictable schedule.

As we move forward to the end of the year, our team continues to work remotely with business as usual. All of us at Ubisecure hope that all of you, your colleagues and families are well and can tolerate this social isolation. We are looking forward to a return to normal office days, coffee breaks and being able to meet you in person. Until that happens, we are happy to engage with you virtually. So if you have any questions over this release, or upcoming work, please don’t hesitate to contact your account team or our support department. We are happy to help with anything around your identity solution needs.