December 4

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    We’re excited to announce that the second stable version of Shibboleth 4.0.1 is now available. 

    Unfortunately, this has brought Shibboleth version 3 to its end of life on 31st December 2020. To maintain your security, it’s essential to upgrade to version 4.0.1, as security patches won’t be available for ShibbolethV3 after December 2020.

    Why should you Upgrade?

    1. Shibboleth IdP v3 will not be supported after 31st December 2020. From a security and operational standpoint, it is essential to upgrade to v4 before then. Read ZDNet’s unpatched vulnerabilities articleto learn why it’s crucial to keep your Organisation’s software patched. 
    2. Improved security on login forms due to new Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF) Protection
    3. Simplification of some configuration elements due to the removal of a lot of deprecated settings leftover from earlier versions
    4. New Attribute Registry Service  and new Data Connector properties provide a simpler and more logical way to encode and define attributes
    5. Uses newer Java version (v11)
    6. Uses the newer version of Jetty web server (v9.4)
    7. Improved  Shibboleth ADFS/Azure AD Authentication Module (SAAM) implementation. Click Here to Learn more about SAAM.  

    How is Overt is preparing to upgrade clients to Shibboleth 4.0.1? 

    In preparation, Overt has now started to upgrade our community’s IdPs to ShibbolethV4. If Overt’s support technicians haven’t already contacted you, they will be in touch shortly to schedule in an upgrade for our Shibboleth Support community.

    The update process:

    The update process will be seamless and we will take care of the whole update procedure as part of your support contract.


    Will there be downtime?

    Overt Software will be taking a phased approach to the Shibboleth upgrade to minimise the risks. Following this approach also avoids users experiencing any single long period of downtime.If you have a load-balanced Shibboleth IdP with us then you should encounter no downtime at all. If you have a single IdP however, downtime will typically be between 5 and 20 minutes. 


    Our new state of the art virtualisation platform:

    Additionally, a number of Overt Software customers will be migrated to our new virtualisation platform at the same time. In this situation, we will run the Shibboleth version 3 and new Shibboleth Version 4.0.1 systems in parallel. Once the version 4.0.1 has been tested, a simple DNS update will begin utilising the version 4.0.1  system with no downtime. 


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