PingAM release notes

Limitations

The following limitations are inherent to the design, not bugs to be fixed.

Redundant files

The installation and upgrade wizards use three libraries that you should remove for security reasons.

When your installation or upgrade is complete, remove the following .jar files from the WEB-INF/lib directory:

  • click-extras-2.3.0.jar

  • click-nodeps-2.3.0.jar

  • velocity-1.7.jar

These files are used only by the wizards. Removing them will have no effect on your installed instance.

Evaluation installations

Sometimes, installing AM for evaluation purposes will fail with a message similar to the following if the JDK’s default truststore’s permissions are 444:

$JAVA_HOME/lib/security/cacerts (Permission denied), refer to install.log under /path/to/install.log for more information.

To work around this issue, locate the truststore that your container is using and change its permissions to 644 before installing AM:

$ sudo chmod 644 $JAVA_HOME/lib/security/cacerts

You can change the permissions to their original settings after you have installed AM.

Identity and data store scaling

The connection strings to the data or identity stores are static and not hot-swappable. This means that, if you expand or contract your DS affinity deployment, AM will not detect the change. To work around this, either:

  • Manually add or remove the instances from the connection string and restart AM or the container where it runs.

  • Configure a DS proxy in front of the DS instances to distribute data across many DS shards, and configure the proxy address in the connection string.

SAML v2.0 in the AM admin UI

The AM admin UI supports SAML v2.0 IDP and SP entities only. After upgrade, entities that don’t have IDP or SP roles are listed, but you can’t inspect or edit them in the UI. AM displays an error when you try to access these entities.

Entities that contain roles other than IDP or SP will only display the IDP or SP roles.

Web Authentication (WebAuthn)

AM doesn’t support the following functionality, as described in the Web Authentication specification:

Registration
Authentication

Refer to MFA: Web Authentication (WebAuthn) for more information.

RADIUS service only supports commons audit logging

The RADIUS service only supports Commons Audit Logging and can’t use the older Logging Service, available in releases before OpenAM 13.0.0.

AM admin UI access requires the Realm Admin privilege

In this version of AM, administrators can use the AM admin UI as follows:

  • Delegated administrators with the Realm Admin privilege can access full AM admin UI functionality within the realms they administer. In addition, delegated administrators in the Top Level Realm who have this privilege can access AM’s global configuration.

  • Administrators with fewer privileges, such as the Policy Admin privilege, can’t access the AM admin UI.

  • The top-level administrator, such as amAdmin, has access to full AM admin UI functionality in all realms and can access AM’s global configuration.

Specifying keys in JWT headers

AM ignores keys specified in JWT headers, such as jku and jwe. Configure the public keys or certificates in AM instead, as explained in the relevant sections of the documentation.

Different AM versions within a site

Different AM versions within a site aren’t supported. Don’t run different versions of AM together in the same AM site.

Special characters in policy, application, or referral names

Don’t use special characters in policy, application or referral names (for example, "my+referral"). AM returns a 400 Bad Request error. The special characters are:

  • double quotes (")

  • plus sign (+)

  • comma (,)

  • less than (<)

  • equals (=)

  • greater than (>)

  • backslash (\)

  • null (\u0000)

XACML policy import and export from different vendors

AM can only import XACML 3.0 files that were created by an AM instance, or that have had minor manual modifications, due to the reuse of some XACML 3.0 parameters for non-standard information.

UMA

UMA is not currently supported in the Platform End User UI.

Amster

Amster has the following known limitations:

  • No support for load balanced deployments

    Amster can’t connect to a load balancer URL. You must connect Amster directly to a single AM instance. Using a load balancer could send sequential commands to different AM instances, and could result in concurrency issues when writing to the underlying configuration store.

  • Bulk import to external application stores with affinity

    If affinity is enabled for an external application data store, bulk import intermittently fails with errors similar to the following:

    Resource path 'http////////eea87a38e3ca476fa93a3669375ada3a' contains empty path elements

    Before using Amster for a bulk import to an application store, disable data store affinity, or remove the load balancer from the application store deployment. You can re-enable affinity when the import has completed.

  • Importing resources containing slash characters can fail

    Some PingAM resources have names that can contain slash characters (/), for example policy names, application names, and SAML v2.0 entities. These slash characters can cause unexpected behavior and failures in Amster when importing into PingAM instances running on Apache Tomcat.

    To workaround this issue, configure Apache Tomcat 8.5 or 9 to allow encoded slash characters by updating the CATALINA_OPTS environment variable. For example:

    On Unix/Linux systems:

    $ export CATALINA_OPTS= \
  "-Dorg.apache.tomcat.util.buf.UDecoder.ALLOW_ENCODED_SLASH=true"
$ startup.sh

    On Windows systems:

    C:\> set CATALINA_OPTS= ^
  "-Dorg.apache.tomcat.util.buf.UDecoder.ALLOW_ENCODED_SLASH=true"
C:\> startup.bat
    It’s strongly recommended that you do not enable org.apache.tomcat.util.buf.UDecoder.ALLOW_ENCODED_SLASH when running AM in production as it introduces a security risk on Apache Tomcat. Additionally, this setting isn’t supported on Apache Tomcat 10.

    Learn more in How do I safely enable the org.apache.tomcat.util.buf.UDecoder.ALLOW_ENCODED_SLASH setting in PingAM? in the Knowledge Base.

  • [INFO] messages showing on SuSE on Amster start up

    Running Amster on SuSE may produce [INFO] messages, for example:

    # ./amster
[INFO] Unable to bind key for unsupported operation: up-history
[INFO] Unable to bind key for unsupported operation: down-history
[INFO] Unable to bind key for unsupported operation: up-history
[INFO] Unable to bind key for unsupported operation: down-history
OpenAM Shell (version build build, JVM: version)
Type ':help' or ':h' for help.
-----------------------------------------------------
am>

    These messages are caused by the keyboard mappings configured in the /etc/inputrc file and can safely be ignored, as they don’t affect functionality.