Once upon a time there was an idea to manage more than the users and their accounts using midPoint. We moved beyond the boundaries of traditional old-fashioned identity managers introducing generic synchronization which allows to synchronize and manage organizations, organizational units, groups, group membership and everything related to identities. The constraints in relation to identities Read more about Once upon a time[…]
MidPoint 3.4 code-named “Heisenberg” was released a few days ago. This is the sixteenth midPoint release since the project started all these long years ago. MidPoint went a very long way since then.
The Heisenberg release is the best midPoint release yet. We have finished access certification functionality, which makes midPoint the very first open source product to enter the identity governance and compliance playing field. We have also improved midPoint internals to better handle inconsistencies of resource data and we have also made many small internal improvements to increase robustness. This was one of the inspirations for the code-name. Similarly to Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle midPoint accepts that there is a degree of uncertainty when it comes to processing of the identity data. It may not be practically possible to always base the decisions on authoritative data. Practical identity management system needs to accept that the identity data are always in a state of flux – and midPoint does just that. And it manages the data reliably even in situations where other systems fail miserably. […]
The organizational structure in midPoint does not always represent a typical enterprise. In case of multitenant setup in the cloud, the organization units represent “tenants” which are completely independent. In enterprise organizations, the sub-organizations and their members are usually readable (to some extent) to all members. In the multitenant setup must maintain tenant isolation. How can this be done using midPoint? […]
It isn’t. That’s how it is. Why? Take any study describing potential information security threats. What do you see among the top threats there? Take another study. What do you see there? Yes. That’s the one. It is consistently marked as one of the most serious threats in vast majority of studies published for (at least) last couple of decades. Yet it looks like nobody really knows what to do about this threat. So, who is this supervillain? He’s right under your nose. It is the insider. […]
Test-Driven Development (TDD) tells us to write the tests first and only then develop the code. It may seem like a good idea. Like a way how to force lazy developers to write tests. How to make sure that the code is good and does what it should do. But there’s the problem. If you are doing something new, something innovative, how the hell are you supposed to know what the code should do? […]
I like OpenLDAP. OpenLDAP server is famous for its speed and good open source character. But it is really infamous for ease of management. Or rather a lack of anything that could be called “easy” when it comes to managing OpenLDAP. Managing OpenLDAP content is not that difficult. For manual management there is excellent Apache Read more about OpenLDAP Management: slapdconf[…]
Do you need to manage different linux machines? Are you struggling with that? Are you losing track of which user can access which Linux machine? Are users upset with different logins for different linux machines? If you answer positively at least one question, I’ll try to alleviate your everyday suffering with this blog. If your answers were no Read more about Provisioning to Unix in 5 steps[…]
In identity management there is a class of petty issues that appear and re-appear all the time. Even though these issues are easy to understand, they are tricky to completely eliminate and they often have very nasty consequences. These seemingly unimportant issues frequently result in nights spent resolving a total breakdown of IDM system. What is this devil that kills sleep and keeps engineers away from the families? It is the daemon of case insensitivity and his friends. […]
Life of a midPoint developer is a colorful one. There are enjoyable periods of building things when you have a luxury of undisturbed raising smaller or larger pieces of code. But sometimes there comes an interrupt: you break something in such a way that you are not able to find what is wrong – for hours or even for days, occasionally. Also regularly, after “feature freeze” points, there arrive periods of intensive and merciless hunting of remaining bugs. Besides this, often a colleague, customer, partner or a friend on the mailing list comes with a problem he or she urgently needs to help with.
The core of midPoint – IdM Model Subsystem – is an extremely powerful and flexible computation engine. It can be configured to implement almost all policies one could imagine. But with such flexibility comes potential (and sometimes very real) complexity: for more advanced configurations it is very easy to make a mistake that, with a bit of bad luck, manifests itself in a quite unexpected way.
Identity Management (IDM) systems usually provide quite a broad mix of features. But there is one thing that no other system can do: management of access rights. No other system comes even close, even if they often pretend to do so. Access rights, privileges, role assignments, authorities, authorizations … whatever these things are called they need to be managed. They need to be assigned to the right people in the right systems at the right time. And that is no easy task. […]