Identity Server 2020.1 is released today, including SSO 8.5 and CustomerID 5.5.

Starting this development cycle late last year, the Engineering team had laid out plans for an updated Continuous Integration (CI) system to better enable them to expose and resolve deviations, as well as create new features, with a rigorous design and testing methodology at the core of the process.

Over the end of last year and the start of 2020, we have completely reorganised the software build pipeline. The Identity Server 2020.1 release, including SSO 8.5.0 and CustomerID 5.5.0, is the first release using this new CI pipeline, permitting us to create automatic builds with automated regression testing built into the process. It’s a fundamental step as we draw closer to our goal of continuous delivery.

Even in this first release with the new CI, we have gained insight and the benefits of new tools, informing plans for future releases.  We’re thrilled that the new CI is in place and delivers robust code from each developer’s local environment to the main branch in a fully tested pipeline. Customers and partners will experience us using this in the coming months as we regularly release patches to resolve observed deviations as quickly and efficiently.

Finland’s Financial Trust Network

Ubisecure is proud to have our Identity Platform at the centre of Telia’s Identity Broker Service (case study here). We have participated, supporting Telia, in Finland’s second generation, globally compliant Finnish Trust Network (FTN). Ensuring multiple financial institutions receive a variety of integration methods and a huge range of use cases, has been a great success. You can read about the FTN in our explainer blog post here: https://www.ubisecure.com/authentication/finnish-trust-network-ftn/.

If you do not operate your online business in Finland, the individual coding elements may not seem consumable to you directly, but we are sure that you will still enjoy the benefits of the FTN and Ubisecure’s work with Telia. Our Engineering team has a tremendous amount of experience in performing the necessary development and integration testing for the FTN and we are ready to bring that experience to other, new, complex, national-level projects. Contact us if you are curious about the FTN, have a complex project or want to know how your business might benefit from our FTN expertise – ubisecure.com/contact.

GSMA’s Mobile Connect and enhanced end user SSO consent capability

For many years, Ubisecure has prided itself on being a standards-conformant development company (even contributing to many standards) – but what does that really mean?  Put simply, interoperability and ease of use.

When there is an applicable standard, we ensure our conformance to it. Of course, there are the obvious commercial benefits to us – more people can use the software if it interoperates consistently. But the real benefit is the usability and security that comes from conforming to standards – the end user experience greatly improves.

Within the Mobile Connect standard from GSMA, there are a number of reporting and auditing improvements, but my personal favourite aspect of the standard is the increased control it gives to end users. Each user is presented with the necessary scope details and will decide if they want to share those details to use the service or not, increasing transparency and trust with the organisation. For those unfamiliar with the term ‘scope’, this is a coding term for a piece of personal detail, like your first and last name, your email address or your phone number. This latest release also means that you don’t have to use Mobile Connect to utilise the service improvement. Within SSO, you can now configure the user login screen to show the required information (for your OAuth 2.0 applications) – thus end users will have a clear understanding of what information each service requires as they log in. Transparency and standardisation equal an excellent improvement for everyone involved.

System Recommendations

I would like to highlight a reformatted System Recommendation page for our Identity Platform. You can find it here: https://developer.ubisecure.com/docs/display/IDS20201/System+Recommendations+and+Supported+Platforms. On this page we detail the operating system versions, the browsers, Java version and database versions supported. You will also find hardware recommendations; how much CPU, RAM and disk, recommended for an example environment. Expect more from this core information page across 2020.

Moving forward through 2020

All of us here at Ubisecure are doing the same things that you all are – working remotely and staying isolated as per our local government regulations. Thankfully, because of the nature of the software and cloud services we offer, remote administration is built into the core operations of our organisation, and thus we are able to continue ‘business as usual’.

Moving forward in 2020 we are going to bring you some anticipated new features like time-based One-Time Password (OTP – think Google Authenticator) as well as core scaling and certification elements. At the same time, our updated procedures will mean we can resolve any observed deviations for you more quickly than ever before.

You can now review our release notes on our Developer Portal, and read our technical blog, for a peek into each of the engineering projects on offer within this 2020.1 release. Watch this space for more detailed blogs over the features and our upcoming plans – we have a lot in store for Identity Platform releases over 2020!