CAS 6.2.0 RC1 Feature Release

The official CAS 6.1.0 GA was released in October 2019. Since then, the project has been moving forward with the development of the next feature release that is tagged as 6.2.0. Please review the release policy to learn more about the scope of the release. This post intends to highlight some of the improvements and enhancements packed into the first release candidate in the 6.2.0 series.

• Apereo Membership
• Get Involved
  • Shake Well Before Use
• Resources
• Overlay
• New & Noteworthy
  • Service Redirection URLs
  • Google Apps Integration
  • LDAP Health Monitoring
  • SAML2 Identity Provider Discovery
  • Spring Expression Language Support
  • OAuth JWT Access Tokens
  • Cipher Strategy Types
  • Microsoft Azure Active Directory
  • SAML2 Metadata Per Service
• Other Stuff
• Library Upgrades
• Credits

Apereo Membership

If you benefit from Apereo CAS as free and open-source software, we invite you to join the Apereo Foundation and financially support the project at a capacity that best suits your deployment. Note that all development activity is performed almost exclusively on a voluntary basis with no expectations, commitments or strings attached. Having the financial means to better sustain engineering activities will allow the developer community to allocate dedicated and committed time for long-term support, maintenance and release planning, especially when it comes to addressing critical and security issues in a timely manner. Funding will ensure support for the software you rely on and you gain an advantage and say in the way Apereo, and the CAS project at that, runs and operates. If you consider your CAS deployment to be a critical part of the identity and access management ecosystem, this is a viable option to consider.

Get Involved

• Start your CAS deployment today. Try out features and share feedback.
• Better yet, contribute patches.
• Suggest and apply documentation improvements.

Shake Well Before Use

We strongly recommend that you take advantage of the release candidates as they come out. Waiting for a GA release is only going to set you up for unpleasant surprises. A GA is simply a tag and nothing more. Note that CAS releases are strictly time-based releases; they are not scheduled or based on specific benchmarks, statistics or completion of features. To gain confidence in a particular release, it is strongly recommended that you start early by experimenting with release candidates and/or follow-up snapshots.

In order to start experimenting with release candidates, at any given time, you should be able to append -SNAPSHOT to the CAS version in order to take advantage of snapshot builds as changes are made and published.

Resources

• Documentation
• Release Schedule
• Release Policy

Overlay

In the gradle.properties of the overlay, adjust the following setting:

cas.version=6.2.0-RC1

New & Noteworthy

Service Redirection URLs

The redirect URL of authentication responses can now be customized and overridden for each registered application.

Google Apps Integration

The CAS integration with Google Apps is now deprecated, scheduled to be removed in the future.

LDAP Health Monitoring

Monitoring LDAP server status for health can now support multiple LDAP servers.

SAML2 Identity Provider Discovery

Carry-over from CAS 6.1.x, SAML2 identity provider discovery allows CAS to embed and present a discovery service as part of delegated authentication.

Spring Expression Language Support

Certain number of components in CAS, primarily attribute release policies that are script-based, are now configurable based on the Spring Expression Language syntax.

OAuth JWT Access Tokens

A dedicated setting is now available to create OAuth access tokens as JWTs by default, globally for all applications.

Cipher Strategy Types

Relevant cipher operations in CAS can now define the cipher strategy and type, mainly to indicate the order of signing and encryption operations.

Microsoft Azure Active Directory

CAS is now able to contruct attribute repositories to fetch user attributes and properties from Microsoft Azure Active Directory using the Microsoft Graph API.

SAML2 Metadata Per Service

SAML2 service definitions can now provide an override for the signing key algorithm used. Furthermore, metadata artifacts and keys/certificates may also be specified as overrides on a per-service basis for all metadata storage services. This continues to be a work-in-progress and will likely be further enhanced in future releases. Furthermore, SAML2 metadata documents and artifacts can now be correctly stored in Oracle databases.

Other Stuff

• The Gradle build is now able to enforce and verify licenses that are approved by the Apereo Foundation.
• SAML2 metadata caching is switched to use the metadata file location as the cache key.
• Additional test cases for JDBC password history management against PostgreSQL.
• The fields property has been removed from LinkedIn delegated authentication.
• Minor tweaks to ensure U2F configuration can correctly be processed on CAS startup.
• Transaction management is now enforced when using JDBC-backed password management.
• CAS Continuous Integration tests on Travis CI now include support for Apache ZooKeeper.
• Additional test cases for JDBC SAML2 metadata management based on Oracle, MySQL and PostgreSQL databases.
• CAS simple-mfa multifactor integration is now enforcing token ownership for the authenticated user.
• Internal cleanup to ensure duplicate test configurations are removed for CAS tests.
• Replicating session information backed by CAS ticket registry can now detect sessions using a configurable cookie.
• Acting as a mini firewall, CAS can now reject authentication requests from suspicious URLs via a regular expression pattern.

Library Upgrades

• Gradle
• Apache Cassandra
• TextMagic
• JavaParser
• Spring
• Spring Security
• JavaParser
• Spring Integration
• Spring Data
• Pac4j
• Twilio
• Hibernate
• Shiro
• Apache Tomcat
• Hazelcast
• SonarQube
• Oshi
• Eureka
• Spring Boot
• Nimbus

Credits

Big thanks to all who participate in the development of this release to submit patches and contribute improvements. Keep’em coming!

Misagh Moayyed