Shibboleth Service Provider V4 Beta 1 now available

[Scott Cantor]

We are pleased to make available the first (and likely only) Beta release of the forthcoming SP V4, the replacement for the current generation of the SP.

As before, the "home page" of sorts for testing information and links to the software:
https://shibboleth.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/DEV/pages/5053906948/SP4+Prelease+Testing

The new RPMs are being sent to the mirrors right now.

Many new features require the Hub plugin version to be advanced to 0.0.3-SNAPSHOT which were first published to this morning.

Major changes of significance:

- The Agent session cache has been extended to include additional options such as encryption of files and most importantly includes the ability to store sessions in encrypted cookies, removing state from the Agent server. An option now exists to forcibly control which attributes provided by a Hub are actually kept by the Agent to limit session size. [1]

- A new Credential service is in the advanced stages of implementation along with a handful of new strategies for easier managing of keys for SAML-supporting Agents. [2] The OIDC support for this is still under development and should be ready for the first official release.

We are not feature complete yet, but the list of remaining work outside of the insanely infinite OIDC potential feature set is pretty small. I don't anticipate another beta, and I don't know whether there will be a formal release candidate or not.

We expect to do the official releases no later than mid-November. Assuming that doesn't slip into 2027, the security support for 3.x will end on July 1, 2028, but we will formally announce that once we meet the planned ship date. Yes, that's aggressive but necessary, due to the state of the libraries underneath that version.

Special thanks to Jarno Huuskonen and Alejandro Perez for their help with testing and feedback.

-- Scott

[1] https://shibboleth.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/spagent4/pages/4551999489/Sessions
[2] https://shibboleth.atlassian.net/wiki/x/FQApSgE