PingDirectoryProxy Server 8.2 release notes - PingDirectory - 8.3

Added a new validate-ldap-schema tool that can be used to examine schema definitions in a set of LDIF files and report any issues that it detects.

Improved the dsframework tool to support multivalued server properties.

Updated support for logging access and error log messages to a syslog server. While the server previously supported logging these messages to a syslog server (through the "syslog-based access log publisher" and "syslog-based error log publisher" logger implementations), these loggers used an older version of the syslog protocol (described in RFC 3164) and only offered support for communicating over UDP.

These loggers are still available for legacy backward compatibility, but we now also offer new "syslog text access log publisher" and "syslog text error log publisher" implementations that use a newer version of the syslog protocol (syslog version 1, described in RFC 5424) and support communicating over UDP or the more reliable TCP. When using TCP, it is also possible to encrypt communication with TLS, and it is possible to configure multiple servers for better redundancy. These loggers use the same space-delimited text format as the former loggers.

We also offer new "syslog JSON access log publisher" and "syslog JSON error log publisher" implementations that offer the same set of capabilities, but that format the message text as JSON objects, which can be more easily parsed by third-party software.

Made several improvements to the parallel-update tool, which can use multiple concurrent threads for improved performance when applying add, delete, modify, and modify DN changes read from an LDIF file. The enhancements include:

* Added support for several additional controls, including proxied authorization, manageDsaIT, ignore NO-USER-MODIFICATION, password update behavior, operation purpose, name with entryUUID, assured replication, replication repair, suppress operational attribute update, and suppress referential integrity updates. The tool also now supports specifying arbitrary controls for inclusion in add, bind, delete, modify, and modify DN requests.

* Made its communication more robust. The tool would previously establish connections only when it was first started, but it can now detect when a connection is no longer valid and can re-establish connections as needed to continue processing. Further, if an operation failed because it was attempted on an invalid connection, that operation can be automatically retried immediately on a newly established connection.

* Added support for failover directory servers. You can now provide the --hostname and --port arguments multiple times to specify information about multiple directory server instances. In the event that the first server listed is not available (or becomes unavailable in the middle of processing), it can automatically try establishing a connection to an alternative server to continue processing there.

* Improved the ability to determine whether all changes were processed successfully. Previously, the tool would always use an exit code of zero if it was able to attempt all of the changes read from the LDIF file, even if some of the changes were not successfully applied. That is still the default behavior, but a new --useFirstRejectResultCodeAsExitCode argument can be used to indicate that if any operations are rejected, the result code from the first rejected operation should be used as the exit code.

* Added support for encrypted LDIF files. If the LDIF file was encrypted with a key from the server's encryption settings database, then the tool will automatically attempt to retrieve the appropriate key. Otherwise, the new --encryptionPassphraseFile argument can be used to supply the encryption passphrase, or the passphrase can be interactively requested from the user.

* The tool is now parallel by default. Previously, if you did not specify a value for the --numThreads argument, it would use a single thread. It now defaults to using eight threads.

* The tool now provides a --followReferrals argument that allows it to automatically attempt to follow any referrals that are returned.

* The tool now provides a menu-driven interactive mode that can be used to provide values for all of the command-line arguments.

Added a config/sample-dsconfig-batch-files directory with set of well commented dsconfig batch files that may be useful in enabling or configuring a variety of features in the server.

Updated the dictionary password validator to support additional options:

* It can now ignore non-alphabetic characters that appear at the beginning or end of the password before checking the dictionary.

* It can strip characters of diacritical marks, including accents, cedillas, circumflexes, diaereses, tildes, and umlauts, before checking the dictionary. If this option is used, then any character with such a mark will be replaced with a base version of the character without that mark (for example, a lowercase letter n with a tilde over it would be replaced with just a lowercase letter n).

* You can define maps with information about character substitutions to use for checking alternative versions of the provided password. For example, if you indicate that "0" might map to "o", "1" or "!" might map to "i", "7" might map to "t", and "3" might map to "e", then the validator can reject a proposed password of "pr0h1b!73d" if the dictionary contains the word "prohibited".

* It can reject a proposed password if a value from the provided dictionary makes up more than a specified percentage of that password.

Added support for new administrative alert types:

* We have added a new admin alert account status notification handler, which can generate administrative alerts whenever an applicable account status notification is generated within the server. For example, this account status notification handler can be added to the root password policy to generate an alert whenever a root user's password is updated or their account is locked as a result of too many failed authentication attempts. A separate alert type has been defined for each account status notification type.

* We have added a new "privilege-assigned" administrative alert that can be raised whenever a new entry is added or an existing entry is updated to include one or more privileges.

* We have added a new "insecure-request-rejected" administrative alert that can be raised whenever the server rejects a request as a result of the reject-insecure-requests global configuration property.

Updated the PingDirectoryProxy Server to improve support for the PLAIN, UNBOUNDID-DELIVERED-OTP, UNBOUNDID-TOTP, and UNBOUNDID-YUBIKEY-OTP SASL mechanisms. Previously, the PingDirectoryProxy Server itself performed all of the processing for those SASL mechanisms and would only work if the PingDirectoryProxy Server could retrieve the appropriate encoded credentials from the backend Directory Server. It will now forward the bind request to the backend server for processing, which allows it to work in deployments in which the backend server prevents the PingDirectoryProxy Server from accessing the stored credentials.

Added support for the OAUTHBEARER SASL mechanism (as described in RFC 7628) to allow LDAP clients to authenticate with OAuth 2.0 bearer tokens.

Added support for invoking a specified set of password validators during bind operations. If the password used to authenticate fails to satisfy one or more of the configured validators, the bind attempt can be rejected, the user can be forced to change their password, or the server can generate an account status notification to take some alternative action (for example, notifying the end user or server administrators).

Replaced the ldappasswordmodify tool with a new version that offers more functionality, including support for additional controls, support for multiple password change methods (the password modify extended operation, a regular LDAP modify operation, or an Active Directory-specific modify operation), and the ability to generate the new password on the client.

Updated setup to provide a --populateToolPropertiesFile argument that will allow it to populate the config/tools.properties file with default values for command-line tool arguments. If requested, properties will be provided for the server address, port, and communication security, and may also include a default bind DN and optionally a bind password. When running setup interactively, it will now prompt to determine which properties (if any) should be populated in the properties file.

Updated the crypto manager to make it possible to augment the set of enabled TLS cipher suites with specific suites to add to or remove from the default set of enabled suites. To enable one or more suites in addition to those in the default set, prefix the names of those suites with the "+" symbol. To disable one or more suites in the default set of enabled suites, prefix the names of those suites with the "-" symbol. This was already possible when configuring cipher suites for the LDAP and HTTP connection handlers, but it was not an option for the crypto manager.

Updated the System Information monitor with an "isDocker" attribute to identify if the server is running in a Docker container.

Made several updates related to the server's handling of data written to standard output and standard error:

* The server can now be configured to rotate the logs/server.out file once it reaches a given size, and it will retain a configurable number of those log files. By default, the server will rotate the file once it reaches 100 megabytes and will keep up to ten files.

* To better facilitate capturing log data in containerized environments, the server now supports writing JSON-formatted access and error log messages to the JVM's original standard output and error streams (which will be separate from the server.out file when the server is started with the --nodetach argument).

* It is now possible to prevent the server from logging messages during startup in non-JSON format. It is also possible to prevent messages about administrative alerts from being written to standard error, or to write those messages in JSON format. These options are especially useful when using JSON-based logging to the console in no-detach mode, as they can help ensure that everything written to standard output and standard error will be formatted as JSON objects.

Updated support for the uniqueness request control to provide a more reliable mechanism for preventing conflicts that arise from operations processed concurrently in the same or different servers. If indicated in the request control, a temporary conflict prevention details entry can be added to the server before searching for existing conflicts, and that entry can be detected during pre-commit processing for other operations with uniqueness request controls that attempt to make a conflicting change.

The server has also been updated to make it possible to generate an administrative alert if a uniqueness conflict is detected during post-commit processing for the uniqueness request control. Even though the conflict cannot be prevented at this stage in processing, the alert can let administrators know about it as soon as it happens so they can take any appropriate corrective action.

Updated setup to create a second encryption settings definition if data encryption is enabled. It will continue to create a definition for 128-bit AES encryption for use as the preferred definition to preserve backward compatibility with existing servers in the topology, but it will now also generate a definition for 256-bit AES encryption. The 256-bit AES definition may become the preferred definition in a future release, but you can use it now by first ensuring that any existing instances are updated to contain the new definition (with the "encryption-settings export" and "encryption-settings import" commands) and then making it the preferred definition (with "encryption-settings set-preferred") in all instances.

Updated the JVM memory usage monitor provider to fix an issue that could prevent the monitor from reporting the total amount of memory held by all memory consumers. Also, fixed an issue that could cause the memory-consumer attribute to use an incomplete message for consumers without a defined maximum size and added an additional memory-consumer-json attribute whose values are JSON objects with data that can be more easily extracted by automated processes.

Updated the collect-support-data tool to make it possible to specify how much data should be captured from the beginning and end of each log file to include in the support data archive. You can also specify the capture size when invoking the tool through an administrative task, recurring task, or extended operation.

Fixed an issue where some state associated with a JMX connection was not freed after the connection was closed. This led to a slow memory leak in servers that were monitored by an application that created a new JMX connection each polling interval.

Eliminated a misleading error message that could be logged at startup if the server was configured with one or more ACIs that only apply when using specific SASL mechanisms.

Fixed an issue where disabling certain backends (such as 'alarms') caused an internal monitor to log unnecessary error messages every few seconds, about not being able to gather data from that backend.

Note that deliberately disabling the 'alarms' backend is not recommended in normal operation, but may occur during backup/restore operations.

The SCIM 2 service on PingDirectory and PingDirectoryProxy now automatically generates a Swagger 2 specification document based on the server's SCIM 2 configuration. To view this document, go to https://<your-server>/api-docs in a web browser.

PingDirectory and PingDirectoryProxy can now perform SCIM 2 paged searches on result sets greater than the configured lookthrough limit. To perform such a search, you must first configure a virtual list view (VLV) index.

Fixed an issue with the manage-profile tool where files in a server profile's dsconfig/ directory without a ".dsconfig" extension could cause failures in manage-profile replace-profile when validating updated dsconfig files.

Fixed an issue that could result in duplicate column headers being produced by the Periodic Stats Logger, even when the header-prefix-per-column attribute was set to true.

Updated the Stats Collector Plugin with a new generate-collector-files configuration property. When using the plugin exclusively for providing metrics to one or more StatsD Monitoring Endpoints, set this property to false to prevent unnecessary I/O.

Updated setup to add options for improving communication security:

* Non-interactive setup now offers a --rejectInsecureRequests argument that will configure the server to reject any request received over a connection that is not encrypted with SSL or StartTLS.

* Non-interactive setup now offers a --rejectUnauthenticatedRequests argument that will configure the server to reject any request received over a connection that is not authenticated (or that is authenticated as the anonymous user).

* Interactive setup now allows you to configure the server with the LDAP connection handler disabled (which was already an option when using non-interactive setup), or enabled but only for communication encrypted with StartTLS.

The --rejectInsecureRequests and --rejectUnauthenticatedRequests arguments can also be used with manage-profile by including them in the setup-arguments.txt file of the server profile.

Updated the interactive command-line tool framework to prefer establishing secure LDAP connections over insecure connections. Previously, when prompting for the information needed to establish a connection, the default option was to create an unencrypted LDAP connection. Now, tools will default to creating an SSL-encrypted connection if the server supports it, or to creating a StartTLS-encrypted connection if that is available but SSL is not. Tools will also default to using streamlined settings when establishing secure connections. Previously, they would always prompt about how to determine whether the server's certificate chain should be trusted. When using the streamlined settings, the tools will only prompt about certificates that cannot automatically be considered trusted using information in the JVM's default trust store, the server's default trust store (config/truststore), or the server's topology registry.

Updated the root password policy so that LDAP bind responses for root users and topology administrators will be delayed by one second after five consecutive failed authentication attempts.

Updated the "delay bind response" failure lockout action to provide an option to delay the response to bind requests initiated by non-LDAP clients (for example, when using HTTP basic authentication). This option is disabled by default because delaying the bind response for non-LDAP clients may require temporarily blocking the thread used to process the request, which could increase the risk of a denial-of-service attack. To help mitigate this risk, if you enable delayed bind responses for non-LDAP clients, we recommend that you also increase the number of request handler threads for all enabled HTTP connection handlers.

Updated the server's command-line tool framework to make it easier and more convenient to communicate with the server over a secure connection when no trust-related arguments are provided. Most non-interactive tools will now check the server's default trust store, the topology registry, and the JVM's default trust store to see if the presented certificate chain can be automatically trusted without the need to prompt the user. If the presented chain cannot be automatically trusted, the user may be interactively prompted to determine whether it should be trusted.

Updated the CRAM-MD5 and DIGEST-MD5 mechanism handlers so that they are no longer considered secure. Although the credentials are encoded in transit, their protection relies on the weak MD5 digest. Further, they require that user passwords be encoded in a reversible form so the server can retrieve them in the clear for use in authentication processing, which increases the risk that they will be exposed in a data breach. This primarily affects the ability to use these SASL mechanisms over an unencrypted connection for users that are required to authenticate in a secure manner (for example, if their password policy has require-secure-authentication set to true, or if their entry has a ds-auth-require-secure-authentication operational attribute with a value of true).

These SASL mechanisms are still enabled by default for legacy backward compatibility purposes, but we discourage their use. To assist with that, we have also provided a sample dsconfig batch file that can be used to disable these SASL mechanism handlers.

Optimized some searches commonly used by the status tool. This should improve the performance of the tool in more complex or large-scale environments.

Upgrade to jetty 9.4

Fixed an issue where using the encryption-settings tool to import definitions with the set-preferred flag could result in none of the imported definitions being set as the preferred definition.

Updated the server to require a minimum key size of 2048 bits when negotiating a TLS cipher suite that uses ephemeral Diffie-Hellman key exchange.

Replaced the ldifsearch, ldifmodify, and ldif-diff command-line tools with more full-featured and robust implementations.

Replaced the ldapcompare tool with a new version that offers more functionality, including support for multiple compare assertions, following referrals, additional controls, and multiple output formats (including tab-delimited text, CSV, and JSON).

Updated the server to use /dev/urandom (on non-Windows systems where that path exists and is readable) instead of /dev/random as the primary source for secure random data. Attempts to read from /dev/random can block if the underlying system does not have sufficient entropy, which can have a severe adverse effect on performance. Reads from /dev/urandom will not block, and the data that it provides is no less secure than data from /dev/random in any way that matters for the server.

Added support for JSON-formatted audit loggers, which complement the existing file-based LDIF-formatted error logger. The JSON-formatted audit log messages provide a record of changes to data in the server and can be written to files on the local filesystem, written to the JVM's standard output or standard error stream, or sent to a syslog server.

Added support for JSON-formatted HTTP operation loggers, which complement the existing file-based loggers using the W3C common log format and a proprietary space-delimited text format. The JSON-formatted HTTP operation log messages provide a record of interaction with HTTP clients and can be written to files on the local filesystem, written to the JVM's standard output or standard error stream, or sent to a syslog server.

Fixed an issue that caused JSON-formatted loggers to use a timestamp format that was not strictly compliant with the ISO 8601 format described in RFC 3339. Timestamps incorrectly omitted the colon between the hour and minute components of the time zone offset.

Fixed an issue that could prevent the uninstaller from removing information about the instance from the topology registry.

Fixed an issue where PingDirectoryProxy Server sometimes logged a null pointer exception if search requests across multiple load-balanced backend servers resulted in a timeout.

Updated manage-profile replace-profile to set encryption settings definitions defined in the newer server profile as preferred in the encryption settings db.

Fixed an issue that could cause an exception when creating a resource in SCIM 1.1 using certain types of DNTemplate.

Fixed an issue where manage-profile generate-profile would print "null" as the generated profile directory when writing to an existing directory.

Fixed an issue in which the Directory REST API could fail to decode certain credentials when using basic authentication.

Fixed an issue in which the Consent API could fail to decode certain credentials when using basic authentication.

Added support for creating or importing a key pair configuration object using an elliptic curve (EC) key algorithm. You can use this to designate the encryption key pair for a JWT access token validator that handles EC-encrypted access tokens.

The JWT Access Token Validator can now validate JWT access tokens signed using the elliptic curve digital signature algorithms ES256, ES384, and ES512.

The JWT Access Token Validator can now validate JWT access tokens encrypted using elliptic curve cryptographic algorithms. The following key encryption algorithms are now supported in addition to RSA-OAEP: ECDH-ES, ECDH-ES+A128KW, ECDH-ES+A192KW, and ECDH-ES+A256KW.

To support best practices for JWT security, you must now also configure the JWT Access Token Validator with explicit allow lists for key encryption and content encryption algorithms. For backward compatibility, the key encryption allow list defaults to RSA-OAEP, while the content encryption allow list defaults to A128CBC-HS256, A192CBC-HS384, and A256CBC-HS512. We recommend setting both allow lists to the strict minimum set of algorithms needed by the Access Token Validator.

Updated the manage-profile replace-profile subcommand to better support updating the server's keystore and truststore files. When using the --generateSelfSignedCertificate argument in a server profile's setup-arguments.txt file, the server will maintain the original keystore and truststore files during replace-profile. Otherwise, replace-profile will use the keystore and truststore specified in the profile's setup-arguments.txt file.

Updated the server to set a unique cluster name when started for the first time.

Updated the online dsconfig step of the manage-profile replace-profile subcommand to support getting LDAP connection arguments from a tools.properties file on the server being updated.

Fixed an issue where boolean LDAP connection arguments like --useSSL and --trustAll would cause manage-profile replace-profile to fail when applying dsconfig online.

Updated the manage-profile setup subcommand to fail if the start-server command has a non-zero exit code.

Performance statistics generated by the Sideband API can now be published by the Periodic Stats Logger. To enable this, use the "included-http-servlet-stat" property of the Periodic Stats Logger.

Upgrade to Jetty 9.4.30

Fixed an issue where the dsconfig list subcommand would not display requested properties.

To support best practices for JWT security, you must now configure the JWT Access Token Validator with an explicit list of the JWT signing algorithms that it accepts. For backward compatibility, this list defaults to the RSA signing algorithms RS256, RS384, and RS512, but we recommend setting this list to the strict minimum set of signing algorithms needed by the Access Token Validator.

Added new override-status-code and additional-response-contents attributes to the Availability State HTTP Servlet Extension. These new attributes can be used to customize the response code and JSON response body of the servlet.

Fixed a typo in the password-expiring template that caused "password_expiration_time_of_day" to be printed instead of the password expiration time.

Updated the manage-profile tool logs to include the duration of each step the tool takes. The new --verbose argument can also be used to display timing information in the tool's console output.

Added a JSON-formatted stats logger to the server's default configuration. The stats logger is disabled by default.

Updated non-interactive setup (including manage-profile setup) to allow the password for the initial root user to be provided in pre-encoded form using the PBKDF2, SSHA256, SSHA384, or SSHA512 password storage scheme. This eliminates the need to have access to the clear-text password when setting up the server.

Fixed an issue where Ping Directory products configured to run as Microsoft Windows services were sometimes unable to automatically restart following an unplanned reboot, due to errors reading a corrupted server status file.

The Administrative Console configuration settings have been updated to account for the new SSO functionality.

For Windows only, there can be a hang on start when global configuration property startup-error-logger-output-location is set to values that contain standard-error. For Windows only, standard-error values are silently mapped to equivalent standard-output values.

Updated the manage-profile generate-profile subcommand to ignore files larger than 100 megabytes when generating a server profile. Fixed an issue where many large files in the server root could cause the tool to run out of memory.

Added a new --adminPasswordFile argument to the manage-topology add-server command, to allow specifying the administrator password with a file rather than with the command line.

Added support for ID Token Validators, which validate the integrity and content of ID tokens issued by OpenID Connect providers. Use these validators with the OAuth Bearer SASL Mechanism Handler to enable single sign-on (SSO) for the Administrative Console using an OpenID Connect provider such as PingOne. Currently, only PingOne is supported for SSO.

Added three built-in identity mappers that you can use to look up administrative accounts stored in the server configuration: Root DN Users, Topology Admin Users, and All Admin Users.

Updated setup and the replace-certificate tool to improve the way we generate self-signed certificates and certificate signing requests to make them more palatable to clients.

To reduce the frequency with which administrators had to replace self-signed certificates, we previously used a very long lifetime for self-signed certificates generated by setup or the replace-certificate tool. However, some clients (especially web browsers and other HTTP clients) have started more strenuously objecting to certificates to long lifetimes, so we now generate self-signed certificates with a one-year validity period. The inter-server certificate (which is used internally within the server and does not get exposed to normal clients) is still created with a twenty-year lifetime.

Also, the replace-certificate tool's interactive mode has been updated to improve the process that it uses to obtain information to include in the subject DN and subject alternative name extension for self-signed certificates and certificate signing requests. The following changes have been made in accordance with CA/Browser Forum guidelines:

* When selecting the subject DN for the certificate, we listed a number of common attributes that may be used, including CN, OU, O, L, ST, and C. We previously indicated that CN attribute was recommended. We now also indicate that the O and C attributes are recommended as well.

* When obtaining the list of DNS names to include in the subject alternative name extension, we previously suggested all names that we could find associated with interfaces on the local system. In many cases, we now omit non-qualified names and names that are associated with loopback interfaces. We will also warn about any attempts to add unqualified or invalid names to the list.

* When obtaining the list of IP addresses to include in the subject alternative name extension, we previously suggested all addresses associated with all network interfaces on the system. We no longer suggest any IP addresses associated with loopback interfaces, and we no longer suggest any IP addresses associated in IANA-reserved ranges (for example, addresses reserved for private-use networks). The tool will now warn about attempts to add these addresses for inclusion in the subject alternative name extension.

Increased the maximum number of RDN components that a DN may have from 50 to 100.

Updated log publisher logic to reduce the amount of CPU that the server consumes when it is idle.

Updated PingDirectoryProxy so that in entry balanced environments, the JoinRequestControl on a search operation is passed through to the directory server instance in more scenarios. This enables more efficient processing, which leads to faster response times.

Updated the system information monitor provider to restrict the set of environment variables that may be included. Previously, the monitor entry included information about all defined environment variables, as that information can be useful for diagnostic purposes. However, some deployments may include credentials, secret keys, or other sensitive information in environment variables, and that should not be exposed in the monitor. The server will now only include values from a predefined set of environment variables that are expected to be the most useful for troubleshooting problems, and that are not expected to contain sensitive information.

Updated the jose4j library used for JWT signing and encryption to version 0.7.2.

The Security Guide is now available online at pingidentity.com. The guide has been removed from the server packaging.