identity gateway

OpenIG 3.1 is now available…

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It’s my great pleasure to announce the general availability of OpenIG 3.1, a minor update of the ForgeRock Open Identity Gateway product, following the press release of early December.

The Open Identity Gateway is a simple standard-based solution to secure access to web applications and APIs. It supports SAMLv2, OAuth 2.0, OpenID Connect and can capture and replay credentials, enabling SSO and Federation.

With a four months release cycle since the previous release, OpenIG 3.1 doesn’t contain many major new features, but it does bring several new enhancements to the product, including :

  • The support for encrypted JSON Web Token (JWT) cookies to store session information on the user-agent. The administrator can decide to keep the default container managed sessions, or use JWT cookies globally or for a specific route.
  • A simplification of OpenIG configuration, with the ability to inline objects, omit specific fields when empty or obvious. This simplification enables faster configuration as well as a better readability for long term maintenance of the service.
  • IMG_4090The introduction of “Decorator” for configuration objects, easily adding new behaviors to existing configured objects. OpenIG 3.1 provides 3 decorators out of the box: a CaptureDecorator that enables debugging and logging in a much easier and more dynamic way; a TimerDecorator that records times spent in the decorated objects; an AuditDecorator that allows to audit operations for any decorated objects.
  • The support for a sample monitoring handler that provides basic statistics about the exchanges and routes. The monitoring information can be used to provide an activity dashboard such as here on the right..
  • Some optimisations and performance improvements when using OpenID Connect and OAuth 2.0

For the complete details of the changes in OpenIG 3.1, please check the release notes.

You can download the ForgeRock product here. It’s been heavily tested by our Quality Assurance team : functional tests on Windows, Mac and Linux, stress tests as proxy, with OAuth2 and OpenID Connect, non-regression tests… The documentation has been entirely reviewed and all examples tested.  The  source code is available in our code repository (https://svn.forgerock.org/openig).

We are interested in your feedback, so get it, play with it and give us your comments, either on the mailing list, the wiki, the OpenIG Forum or through blog posts.

 

New features in OpenIG 3.1: Statistics

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OpenIGOpenIG 3.1 is almost out the doors… Just a few days of testing and it will be generally available.

The new version introduces a general purpose auditing framework, and some basic monitoring capabilities. Mark wrote a blog post describing the details of the auditing framework and the monitoring endpoint. I’ve started playing with it for demonstration purposes and wanted to get more out of it.

If you want to expose the monitoring endpoint, you need to add the following 00-monitor.json file under .openig/config/routes/ and decorate a few handlers as Mark describes in his post. You might also want to extend this configuration to require authentication and avoid letting anyone have access to it.

The monitoring endpoint allows to display basic statistics about the different routes: the counts of in progress requests, completed requests and failures. So the output looks like this:

{"Users":{"in progress":0,"completed":6,"internal errors":0},
 "main":{"in progress":1,"completed":1074,"internal errors":0},
 "groups":{"in progress":0,"completed":4,"internal errors":0},
 "Default":{"in progress":0,"completed":16,"internal errors":0},
 "monitor":{"in progress":1,"completed":1048,"internal errors":0}
}

Each tag represents a route in OpenIG, including the “monitor” one,  “main” representing the sum of all routes.

I was thinking about a better way to visualise the statistics and came up with the idea of a monitoring console. A few lines of Javascript, using JQuery and Bootstrap, an additional configuration file for OpenIG and here’s the result:

Screen Shot 2014-12-09 at 13.15.18

As you can see, this adds a new endpoint with its own audit: /openig/Console. The endpoint can be protected like any other route using OAuth2.0, OpenID Connect, SAML or basic authentication.

Let’s look at what I’ve done.

I’ve added a new route under ~/.openig/config/routes: 00-console.json with a single StaticResponseHandler. Instead of adding the whole content in the json file, I’ve decided to let the handler load the whole content from a file (named console.html). This allows me to separate the logic from the content.

00-console.json

{
    "handler":{
        "type": "StaticResponseHandler",
        "config" : {
            "status": 200,
            "entity": "${read('/Users/ludo/.openig/config/routes/console.html')}"
        }
    },
    "condition": "${exchange.request.method == 'GET'
        and exchange.request.uri.path == '/openig/Console'}",
    "audit" : "Console"
}

Note that if you are copying the 00-console.json file, you will need to edit the file location to match the absolute path of your console.html file.

Now the console.html file is actually a little bit long to display here. But you can download it here.

But it’s a basic html page, which loads Jquery and Bootstrap:

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en">
<head>
<link rel="stylesheet" href="//maxcdn.bootstrapcdn.com/bootstrap/3.3.0/css/bootstrap.min.css">
<!-- Optional theme -->
<link rel="stylesheet" href="https://maxcdn.bootstrapcdn.com/bootstrap/3.3.1/css/bootstrap-theme.min.css">
<!-- Latest compiled and minified JavaScript -->
<script src="//code.jquery.com/jquery-1.11.1.min.js"></script>
...

And at regular interval (default is 3 seconds), it gets the statistics from the monitoring endpoint, and displays them as a table:

...
<script>
$(document).ready(function () {
    setInterval(function () {
        $.get("/openig/monitor").success(writeRoutesStats);
    }, 3000);
});
...

The whole Console fits within 60 lines of html and javascript, including some logic to use different colours when internal errors occur on a route.

Finally, the nice thing about the Console, being based on BootStrap, it also has responsive design and allows me to monitor my OpenIG instance from anywhere, including my phone:IMG_4090

If you do install the Console on your instance of OpenIG 3.1 (or one of the latest nightly builds), please send me a screenshot. And if you do customize the javascript for an even nicer look and feel, don’t hesitate to send a pull request.

On track for the release…

LudoLeave a comment

Yesterday we’ve announced the new releases of 3 of ForgeRock products : OpenAM 12.0, OpenIDM 3.1 and OpenIG 3.1.

There are still a few days before we make OpenIG 3.1 generally available. We are currently stressing it out and reviewing the documentation. But all indicators are green for now :

Snapshot of OpenIG Issue Tracker

Another great resource to get started with OpenIG

LudoLeave a comment

guillaumeI forgot to mention, but Guillaume, the lead developer for OpenIG, has also started a blog to discuss about Middleware, and share his experience and thoughts about OpenIG.

He has started a great series of posts introducing OpenIG, it’s use cases, some terminology…

I encourage you to take a look at it here : In Between – a Blog by Guillaume Sauthier

Some OpenIG related articles…

LudoLeave a comment

OpenIGMy coworkers have been better than me at writing blog articles about OpenIG (at least faster).

Here are a few links :

Simon Moffat describes the benefits of OAuth2.0 and OpenID Connect and how to start using those with OpenIG 3.0.

Warren Strange went a little bit further and with a short introduction to OpenIG, made available on GitHub sample configuration files for OpenIG 3.0 to start using OpenID Connect.

Mark, who run ForgeRock documentation team, describes the improvements done on the Introduction section of the OpenIG docs that we’re making based on received feedback since the release of OpenIG 3.0.