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Safeguard Authentication Services 5.0.3 - Release Notes

Safeguard Authentication Services 5.0.3

Release Notes

03 September 2021, 11:52

These release notes provide information about the Safeguard Authentication Services 5.0.3 release. For the most recent documents and product information, see Safeguard Authentication Services - Technical Documentation.

About this release

Safeguard Authentication Services extends the capabilities of UNIX, Linux, and Mac systems to seamlessly and transparently join Active Directory and integrate Unix identities with Active Directory Windows accounts.

Safeguard Authentication Services 5.0.3 is a minor release that includes various bug and stability fixes. See Resolved issues for a list of fixes included in this release.

End of support notice

After careful consideration, One Identity has decided to cease the development of the Management Console for Unix (MCU). Therefore, the MCU will enter limited support for all versions on April 1, 2021. Support for all versions will reach end of life on Nov 1, 2021. For definitions of support, see the Software Product Support Lifecycle Policy.

As One Identity retires the MCU, we are building its feature set into modern platforms starting with Software Distribution and Profiling. Customers that use the MCU to deploy Authentication Services and Safeguard for Sudo can now use our Ansible collections for those products, which can be found at Ansible Galaxy.

Supported platforms

The following table provides a list of supported Unix and Linux platforms for Safeguard Authentication Services.

CAUTION: In Safeguard Authentication Services version 5.1, support for the following Linux platforms and architectures will be deprecated:

  • Linux platforms

    • CentOS Linux 5

    • Oracle Enterprise (OEL) Linux 5

    • Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 5

  • Linux architectures

    • IA-64

    • s390

Make sure that you prepare your system for an upgrade to a supported Linux platform and architecture, so that you can upgrade to Safeguard Authentication Services version 5.1 when it is released.

Table 1: Unix agent: Supported platforms

Platform

Version

Architecture

Amazon Linux AMI

 

x86_64

Apple MacOS

10.14 or later

x86_64, ARM64

CentOS Linux

5, 6, 7, 8

Current Linux architectures: s390, s390x, PPC64, PPC64le, IA-64, x86, x86_64, AARCH64

Debian

Current supported releases

x86_64, x86, AARCH64

Fedora Linux

Current supported releases

x86_64, x86, AARCH64

FreeBSD

10.x, 11.x, 12.x

x32, x64

HP-UX

11.31

PA, IA-64

IBM AIX

6.1, 7.1, 7.2

Power 4+

OpenSuSE

Current supported releases

x86_64, x86, AARCH64

Oracle Enterprise Linux (OEL)

5, 6, 7, 8

Current Linux architectures: s390, s390x, PPC64, PPC64le, IA-64, x86, x86_64, AARCH64

Oracle Solaris

10 8/11 (Update 10),

11.x

SPARC, x64

Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL)

5, 6, 7, 8

Current Linux architectures: s390, s390x, PPC64, PPC64le, IA-64, x86, x86_64, AARCH64

SuSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES)/Workstation

11, 12, 15

Current Linux architectures: s390, s390x, PPC64, PPC64le, IA-64, x86, x86_64, AARCH64

Ubuntu

Current supported releases

x86_64, x86, AARCH64

New features

New features in version 5.0

The new feature in Safeguard Authentication Services5.0 follow.

Ansible support (224151)

Infrastructure Administrators can use Ansible 2.9 or later for the following functions, including generating reports.

  • Install, upgrade, and uninstall Safeguard Authentication Services (SAS) software packages and create reports to summarize software deploy status
  • Configure and join Safeguard Authentication Services to my AD domain including:
    • Perform preflight checks

    • Modify vas.conf

    • Modify users/groups.allow and users/groups.deny

    • Modify user/group overrides

    • Join/unjoin SAS from domain

    • Create reports to summarize configure/join status

Authentication Services Ansible Collection

The One Identity Authentication Services Ansible Collection, referred to as ansible-authentication-services, consists of roles, modules, plugins, report templates, and sample playbooks to automate software deployment, configuration, Active Directory joining, profiling, and report generation for Safeguard Authentication Services. Go to: https://github.com/OneIdentity/ansible-authentication-services.

Ansible details

For Ansible information consult:

NOTE: One Identity open source projects are supported through One Identity GitHub issues and the One Identity Community. This includes all scripts, plugins, SDKs, modules, code snippets or other solutions. For assistance with any One Identity GitHub project, please raise a new Issue on the One Identity GitHub project page. You may also visit the One Identity Community to ask questions. Requests for assistance made through official One Identity Support will be referred back to GitHub and the One Identity Community forums where those requests can benefit all users.

Explicit mapping of users to valid certificates (smart card) (198067)

Mapping certificates to users can be done implicitly or explicitly. Authentication Services supports mapping one cert to one user or mapping multiple certs to one user. Mapping one cert to multiple users is not supported. For details, see the Smart Cards Administration Guide, Map certificate to user (implicit and explicit).

Group policy updates (198055)

Safeguard Authentication Services can apply additional policies to Unix systems:

  • mac OS X policies are updated
  • Privileged Manager Policies are updated

License validator (198066)

New licenses have to be added prior to upgrading to version 5.0. If you have a mixed environment with some clients running on 5.0 and some running on an older version, you will need to have both licenses available.

CAUTION: If you upgrade Safeguard for Authentication Services before adding the license, the caches will empty and SAS will be unusable. You can add the license then either rejoin or restart vasd and run vastool flush. You can update the Control Center any time without issue.

Windows Administrators can load the Safeguard Authentication Services license into Active Directory.

Unix Administrators must have a current license.

macOS: Added functionality (198050)

The following functionality was added for macOS platforms. For additional information, see KB 322901.

  • Installation is from the One Identity Support page.
  • In Application Properties, an Options tab has been added to control App Store and Game Center settings. For example, you can choose to allow software update notifications.
  • In Media Access Properties, there are two new settings:
    • Allow AirDrop
    • Allow transfers with Finder or iTunes
  • Software Update Properties have been added related to purchasing or installing apps.
  • System Preference Properties selection was enhanced.
  • Wireless Profile Properties now include the ability to use hidden networks, auto join networks, proxies, protocol configurations, and authentication. This policy also works with vascert to provide a certificate that can be used to join a network.

Support for unattended join using Windows Offline Domain Join (ODJ) credentials (198057)

An Administrator can use a Windows Offline Domain Join (ODJ) credential instead of a keytab for scripting an unattended installation of Safeguard Authentication Services to enhance security.

There must be connectivity from the Unix machine to domain controllers. When using this method of joining AD, the [domain] is not needed on the vastool join command, nor credentials. That information will come from the file. More information is in the vastool man page.

The join can work in the following ways:

  • vastool join [some flag] <path to the offline join file>
  • vastool join to use a newly defined environment variable that points to the location of the offline join file
  • vastool join to use if the flag wasn't passed and the environment variable is not set, a predefined location is checked for the offline join file

Resolved issues

The following is a list of issues addressed in this release.

Table 2: General resolved issues in version 5.0.3
Resolved Issue Issue ID

The network interface used by the ipmond tool cannot be configured from the dnsupdate.conf configuration file and cannot be autodetected.

The network interface used by the ipmond tool now can be specified in the dnsupdate.conf configuration file using the "NetworkInterface" option. If the "NetworkInterface" option is not specified or if the "NetworkInterface" option is set to "auto", the ipmond tool attempts to detect the interface that belongs to the default network route ("0.0.0.0"). This detection can work through the "/proc/net/route" (on Linux systems), or using the "netstat" command (if the "netstat" is available on the system). To restore the previous behavior (that is, listening on all interfaces) set the "NetworkInterface" option to "all".

199551

On systems with the "authselect" tool and "nscd" daemon, users could not log in right after joining the Active Directory.

Users can now log in right after joining the Active Directory.

267078

The "vastool status" command has a test that was supposed to detect and report timesync errors but it did not detect and report them.

The "vastool status" command now detects and reports timesync errors.

273371

The "vastool create <user>" command replaced space and dot characters with an underscore.

The "vastool create <user>" command now does not replace space and dot characters.

273374

When logging in as a local user using password-less authentication, the PAM module was triggering a lot of unnecessary "vasd" calls. These calls caused potential performance issues by slowing down the system. The login process for a local user using password-less authentication could take too long.

The number of calls from the PAM module to the "vasd" daemon is significantly reduced in password-less authentication. The login process for a local user using password-less authentication is faster now.

274626

The default value of the "kdc_timeout" parameter was documented as 3 seconds in the man page of the "vas.conf" configuration file, but the actual default value was 30 seconds.

The default value of the "kdc_timeout" parameter is fixed to 3 seconds. The documented default value and the actual default value of the "kdc_timeout" parameter are now identical.

276218

The "vasd" daemon crashes when the number of open file descriptors exceeds 1024 with the following message:

AuthChild::HandleGetNextMessageFailure Error processing message. rc=71 ("Protocol error").

The "vasd" daemon can now handle more than 1024 open file descriptors.

276395

Invalid license file is reported on an ERROR logging level even though it should be reported on a DEBUG logging level.

The "vgptool" tool verifies the license file. The invalid license file is now reported on a DEBUG logging level. This is now an expected behavior in systems with version 4 and 5 SAS product models.

277273

The "${HOME}/.vas_logon_server" file was created every time during authentication.

By default, the "${HOME}/.vas_logon_server" file is not created anymore. This file contains the name of the server that performed the authentication. The "pam_vas" component uses the "advertise_auth_server" option now instead of the previous "no_advertise_auth_server" option. The "${HOME}/.vas_logon_server" file is created only if the user enables the "advertise_auth_server" option.

278331

When the user is logging in as an Active Directory user, the Management Console for Unix (MCU) displays either of the following error messages:

Communication error. [Error performing LDAP operation]

Communication error. [Login failed because user SID could not be resolved with AD.]

This error is caused while updating the Safeguard Authentication Configuration (SAC), because the "ComputerName" and the "OperatingSystem" entries may be added to the Active Directory Schema with empty descriptions. The MCU cannot handle items with empty descriptions, which causes MCU to break.

The fix ensures that when updating the SAC, the "ComputerName" and the "OperatingSystem" entries always have a default description.

276393

On recent AIX, DB2 may crash in certain edge cases due to thread safety issues.

Added mutexes to avoid concurrency issues on multiple threads and prevent crashing.

268477

PAM message for required password change can be customized. Wait for Pressing ENTER when connecting via ssh can be disabled.

Message displayed on password change request (by default "Your password is expired. Please follow the prompts to set a new password.") can be customized.

When connecting via SSH, certain messages had an additional 'Press Enter to Continue' text and were waiting for the user to press Enter. This behavior can now be disabled.

265431

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