Shibboleth Identity Provider V5.2.0 now available

[Scott Cantor]

After a rather long incubation of almost 2 years, the Shibboleth Project is pleased to announce the release of V5.2.0 of the Identity Provider software.

This is now the only officially supported version, closing out the V5.1 branch.

The standard installer is available from [1]. The MSI will be published when available under that location, but please consider migrating to the standard installer, as it is functionally identical, and can be used to upgrade MSI-installed versions of the IdP. We will be discontinuing the MSI variant in the future, likely with the eventual release of V6.0

Please review the Release Notes [2] as this is a relatively significant minor upgrade, which is based on major new versions of Spring and Spring WebFlow, and requires a Java container supporting Servlet 6.1, which is beyond what many older containers support, which we have noted.

The most impactful changes aside from that are to the subject canonicalization support that normalizes the output of authentication, with a variety of new features to simplify configuration in many cases, particularly when proxying to other IdPs. It is intended to be backwardly compatible and has been so while testing, but we will address any issues that arise expediently.

Note that Spring 6.x, used by UdP V5.1, hits its end of life this summer. Spring 7.0 is expected to receive support through mid-2027, so this release will provide that runway.

The eventual SP4 Hub plugins, which will be part of the upcoming SP alpha release, require this version to operate; at present this *may* be the baseline release for the SP 4 official release when it occurs, but that's not a certainty, we may have to make further changes to support that work.

-- Scott

[1] https://shibboleth.net/downloads/identity-provider/latest5/
[2] https://shibboleth.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/IDP5/pages/3199500367/ReleaseNotes