PingAccess 8.0 (December 2023) - PingAccess - 8.0

If you have PingAccess 6.2 or below, you cannot upgrade directly to PingAccess 8.0. You must upgrade to a version above 6.2 first, and then upgrade to 8.0.

This is because in PingAccess 8.0, an outdated H2 JAR file was removed, and PingAccess 6.2 and below use an H2 embedded database.

If you're using the PingOne Protect integration, you can now enable device profiling to implement attribute-based access control (ABAC) and enforce a complete zero trust strategy with PingAccess and PingOne Protect. You can:

• Set stricter constraints around when to perform a new risk evaluation.
• Automatically perform a new device profile collection and risk evaluation when an end user's IP address changes.
• Include device-related predictor types in the PingOne risk policy that you use for risk evaluation, including user and event behavior analytics and bot detection risk predictors. This enables you to use the default PingOne risk policy without needing to make any modifications and to trigger enforcement strategies like step-up authentication if abnormal device settings are detected.

For more information on enabling device profiling in PingAccess, see Risk policy field descriptions. For more information on PingOne predictor types, see Risk policies.

Added the ability to use OAuth 2.0 Demonstrating Proof of Possession (DPoP) capabilities in a resource server role. This enables you to meet potential FAPI 2.0 Advanced Profile authorization server requirements in the future and prevent fraudulent access token usage.

Enable DPoP-bound access tokens in your token provider or admin token provider configuration. You can also override the global DPoP settings in your API authentication settings, or at the application or resource level for an API or Web + API application. For more information, see:

• If you're using PingFederate as the token provider, see Configuring OAuth resource servers.
• If you're using PingOne as the token provider, see Configuring PingOne.
• If you're using a common token provider, see Configuring OAuth authorization servers.
• To configure DPoP in your admin token provider settings, see Configuring an admin token provider.
• To override the global DPoP settings for API authentication, see Configuring API authentication.
• To override the global DPoP settings at the application level, see Application field descriptions.
• To override the global DPoP settings at the resource level, see Adding application resources.

PingAccess has made common token provider configuration more flexible:

• When you’re configuring the OAuth authorization server for a common token provider, the Introspection Endpoint field is now required only if you configure a remote access token validator on your PingAccess application.
• When you’re configuring an application, before you can select a remote access token validator from the Access Validation list, you must configure an Introspection Endpoint on the OAuth Authorization Server tab.

This increased flexibility enables you to configure Azure AD as the common token provider for protected API applications.

• Added the ability to filter your applications by their SPA support status. For more information, see Editing an application.
• Added the SPA Support property to the Properties tab on PingAccess applications. You can now check whether an application has SPA support enabled by expanding the application instead of having to expand and open it.

By default, private key JWT OIDC code flow uses dynamic keys managed automatically by PingAccess. You can now opt to use static keys instead if you want to control key rotation yourself. For more information, see Configuring static signing keys.

You can:

• Enable static keys and select a signing key from your list of configured key pairs on a new page in the administrative console, Static OAuth/OIDC Keys. Then select a Signing Algorithm on the associated web session.
• Complete your static key configuration at the token provider. Click View Metadata on the Static OAuth/OIDC Keys page to retrieve your JWKS information and submit this information to your token provider. Alternately, use the PingAccess admin API endpoint GET /staticKeys/JWKS to retrieve your JWKS information.
  Note:

  You must update your JWKS information at the token provider because static and dynamic keys use different JWKS endpoints in PingAccess.

  For example, if you're using PingFederate as the token provider, you must update the JWKS URL field in your configured OAuth client.

Added support for Microsoft SQL Server 2022 to enable migration to SQL server versions included in Microsoft's mainstream support policy.

Qualified support for server-sent events (SSE) in PingAccess. You can use WebSockets or SSE to facilitate communication between the requesting client and a protected site. SSE pushes real-time updates in one direction, from server to client, whereas WebSockets uses bidirectional communication.

Added support for OAuth tokens created by Microsoft Azure AD for administrative API OAuth. This improves account security for administrators with Microsoft Azure AD configured as the token provider and enables administrators to use their own accounts to make PingAccess API changes. Relaxed the following PingAccess requirements:

• If you're using either a common token provider or administrative token provider configuration, you can now use a local access token validator to bypass administrative API OAuth validation that checks whether the token provider supports the introspection endpoint. This is necessary because Microsoft Azure AD does not have an introspection endpoint.
• If the administrative token is validated by a local access validator, the administrative API OAuth no longer enforces whether an administrative token contains a scope claim with a configurable value, because Microsoft Azure AD uses a scp claim instead.

Added the ability to map the SAML token received from a SAML token mediator site authenticator to an HTTP request header that you specify instead of mapping the token as a request cookie. For more information, see the Logged In Header Name field.

You can now choose a case-matching strategy for administrative single sign-on and OAuth roles, not just web session attribute rules. Selection options are:

• Case-sensitive
• Case-insensitive
• DN matching

For more information, see Configuring API authentication and Configuring admin UI SSO authentication.

Updated the Help icon link in the administrative console that takes you to the PingAccess documentation. In PingAccess 8.0 forward, this link will now take you to the version of the documentation that matches the version of PingAccess that you're using.

Improved an error message caused by sending an admin API request to create or update a risk policy with invalid or missing data. The error message no longer returns a NullPointerException error.

Removed old fonts from the PingAccess administrative console to improve user experience.

Fixed inaccurate reference to the OAuth authorization server as the OpenID Connect provider in the DELETE method of the oauth/authServer endpoint.

Fixed an issue that caused the SniHandlerConfigBuilder to fail to declare a specific keystore type for the PingAccess SslContext server, which could result in PingAccess taking longer to start up if the target JVM's default keystore type was PKCS#12.

The SniHandlerConfigBuilder now specifically declares JKS as the keystore type to prevent unexpected performance losses.

Fixed an issue that caused the PingAccess administrative console UI to fail to render if a newly added configuration field was missing from the plugin data that was saved previously.

For more information, see create your own plugins.

Fixed an issue that caused unexpected behavior in PingAccess if you deleted an entity while a clustered console node was preparing a replication payload to share with other nodes in the cluster. Some examples of this unexpected behavior included:

• Hibernate throwing EntityNotFoundExceptions errors.
• PingAccess adding null objects to the replication payload. This behavior didn't always register as an error in the administrative console, but could still cause the replication data readers to throw exception errors.

Fixed an issue that caused the PingAccess administrative console UI to display a blank page if you attempted to configure a Groovy script field within a plugin entity in a composite field.

For more information, see create your own plugins.

Fixed an issue that caused list fields embedded in composite plugin fields to register improperly in the form data for the PingAccess administrative console UI.

For more information, see create your own plugins.

Fixed an issue that caused PingAccess to replace object IDs defined on key pairs or certificates imported through the administrative API with an auto-generated object ID.

Additionally, the POST /keyPairs/import and POST /certificates API models have been updated to include more information on how to assign an ID for these object types.

Fixed an issue that caused PingAccess to reset an environment's configured log setting categories on startup.

Fixed an issue with the PingOne Protect integration that caused PingAccess to calculate expiration values for cached risk evaluation results in milliseconds instead of seconds. This unexpected input value was disabling token caching after making a risk evaluation because PingAccess was receiving a false positive result that the risk evaluation cache data had expired.

Azure AD creates a Application (Client) ID value that exceeds 36 characters and automatically assigns that value as the Audience value in the access token. This prevented PingAccess from validating Azure AD access tokens because PingAccess previously accepted a maximum of 32 characters for an Audience value.

PingAccess can now accept a longer Audience value.

Fixed an issue that caused PingAccess engine or replica admin nodes to update their replication configuration identifier before they had finished integrating changes into their runtime configuration. This would result in nodes using stale configuration information until a new configuration change event happened.

Fixed an issue that caused admin API OAuth settings to be excluded from bulk export operations if you configure admin API OAuth with an access token validator but haven't set client credentials.

When installing PingAccess as a Windows service using Windows PowerShell and Java 8, the error message Could not find or load main class can be safely ignored.

PingAccess 6.3 deployments that use the Sideband API feature cannot be upgraded using the zero downtime upgrade procedure. You must use a planned outage to upgrade such an environment.

PingAccess may have difficulty maintaining TLS 1.3 connections when using JDK 11.0.0, 11.0.1, or 11.0.2 because of a defect in those versions. This might cause upgrades to fail on systems using these versions.

Incorrect handling for IPv6 literals in host header. Note that IPv6 is not currently supported.

Request Preservation is not supported with Safari Private Browsing.

Engines and admin replicas do not connect to admin console if a combination of IP addresses and DNS names are used.

The token processor can't connect to a JWKS endpoint via SSL when an IP is used rather than a hostname. To workaround this issue, add the hostname as the subject alt name on the key pair.

In custom PingAccess plugins, using com.pingidentity.pa.sdk.http.Message#setBody or com.pingidentity.pa.sdk.http.Message#setBodyContent directly on an exchange's Response object to modify content from the backend can put PingAccess connections into indeterminate states. The workaround is to:

1. Either make a new instance or a copy of the Response object and modify body content in the copy.
2. Call com.pingidentity.pa.sdk.http.Exchange#setResponse with the new or copied request and response objects.
   Note:

   com.pingidentity.pa.sdk.http.Exchange#setResponse discards the pending response body from the backend immediately. In a future release, a fix will be added to discard the response body only when PingAccess writes the response to the frontend.

Firefox does not correctly support the HTML5 time tag. When using the time range rule, enter time in 24-hour format.

Upgrades will fail with a risk-based authorization rule if a third-party service is not used in the rule.

If you create multiple virtual hosts with a shared hostname and associate the hostname with a server key pair, the virtual hosts retain the connection with the server key pair even if they are subsequently renamed. The virtual host must be deleted and recreated to remove the association.

Invalid special characters ((),/;<=>?@[\]{}") can be added to the certificate to Header Mapping field in an identity mapping. Adding this identity mapping to an application will cause 400 errors when the application is accessed.

Assigning a new key pair to the Admin HTTPS listener if the browser does not trust the new key pair can prevent the UI from functioning. The workaround is to close the browser and re-open it so that all connections to the admin node use the new certificate.

If PingAccess is repeatedly stopped and restarted in FIPS mode, subsequent restarts can take up to 5 minutes to complete. The workaround is to use a tool such as rng-tools to refresh /dev/random and make more entropy available faster. For example:

sudo yum install rng-tools
sudo rngb -b 

Cloud HSM functionality works in FIPS mode but not in regular mode for Java8u261 and later. RSASSA-PSS signing algorithms fail with Java8u261 or later, and HSM vendors and core Java use different naming conventions for the RSASSA-PSS algorithm. There is a documented workaround in Adding an AWS CloudHSM provider.

Due to an outstanding defect in the Kong API Gateway, the ping-auth plugin currently does not support requests that utilize the Transfer-Encoding header. If PingAccess is used as the external authorization server, the rewrite content rule can prevent the page from displaying.

If a client certificate has a certificate revocation list (CRL) DistributionPoint that points to an extremely large CRL, PingAccess might suffer from high memory usage leading to Out of memory (OOM) exceptions.

BC-FIPS and HSMs are not supported when using Java 17.

After starting PingAccess for the first time on a Windows system or upgrading PingAccess on a Windows system, a warning message is logged reporting that the pa.jwk file was not made non-executable. This message can be ignored.

There are a few potential scenarios when the PingAccess data layer might encounter deadlocks. PingAccess should be able to recover from these deadlocks, so hibernate error logs can be ignored when followed by the log message Recovered from database deadlock with transaction retry.

A race condition caused by importing applications with significant reuse of virtual hosts or context roots can deadlock the Apache Derby DB.

PA-14974 added systematic deadlock handling to reattempt operations that lead to a deadlock condition in Apache Derby, but a specific fix for this deadlock scenario will be added in a future release to reduce wasted cycles and warning or error log messages.

If you have the administrative console and API open at the same time and you're on a console page that isn't Log Settings, the Log Settings page won't immediately populate any log changes that you make in the API.

To work around this issue, go to the Log Settings page. Perform a hard refresh, or go to another page and then return to Log Settings.

Mutual TLS with a backend site that requires post-handshake authentication is not supported when using TLS 1.3. Current workaround options are to remove the requirement for post-handshake authentication from the backend site or to disable TLS 1.3.

Currently, SNI is only set up for virtual hosts that are actively configured in an application. This can prevent PingAccess from presenting an expected certificate for a given redirect host.

The workaround is to configure the source host in a redirect as the virtual host for a disabled PingAccess application.