Today on August, 29th 2018 privacyIDEA 2.23 is released. Packages are available in the public Launchpad-Repositories for Ubuntu 14.04LTS and 16.04LTS. The Multi-Factor Authentication System privacyIDEA can also be installed via the Python Package Index on any other Distributionen.

Automated processes

Event Handlers were already added to privacyIDEA in Version 2.12. They enable the administrator, to connect any event to new actions like user notification, token management or any arbitrary script. If such an event occurrs, the defined action is triggered.

With version 2.23 these actions can now be triggered, before the originial event is processed. We distinguish Post-Event-Handling and Pre-Event-Handling. E.g. the administrator can define, that a user, who has no token assigned and tries to authenticate, gets a new token enrolled. And this newly enrolled token will be directly used during this authentication request. The logon experience for the user is totally transparent. There is no additional effort for the administrator.

This way a lot of tasks, which would otherwise be done manually or called by a script, will be executed automatically just at the right moment within privacyIDEA. This way the administrator can cope with unforeseen scenarios and can automate actions accordingly.

The Pre-Event-Handler ernolls a token for the user, if the user has no token, yet. This token is used in the very same authentication request.

Periodic tasks

In version 2.23 the administrator can define periodic, recurring tasks. Besides these can be used, to gather information about or from the privacyIDEA system. Several modules (“Event Counter”, “Simple Statistics”) are used to define, what should happen periodically.

E.g. using the Statistics Module the administrator can monitor the number of the available (not assigned) hardware tokens. This is often important, so that the administrator know, when he needs to reorder new hardware tokens.

The Event Counter module records how often a certain event has occurred. A simple scenario is to record the numter of failed authentication requests.

privacyIDEA saves all this information to time series. Using tools like Grafana you can plot this to relevant graphs.

Events – like authentication requests – can be recorded and view graphically in a timeline.

2FA for the masses

Two-Factor-Authentication is widely spread. A lot of services offer 2FA to their end users. But it is not always possible to use hardware devices. Not every user has a smartphone. Sometimes users to not want to pass their mobile number for SMS tokens – due to privacy concerns. There is not one solution for all. This is the strength of privacyIDEA, you can mix and match a lot of different token types.

With version 2.23 you also get the TAN token. The administrator now can import existing TAN lists into privacyIDEA. This way you can easily add authentication to a huge number of users and you can smoothly migrate from an existing TAN solution to privacyIDEA.

More at Github

You can find the complete Changelog at Github.

In a few weeks the NetKnights GmbH will release privacyIDEA Enterprise Edition 2.23.1. In addition it will be available for RHEL/CentOS 7 and the Univention Corporate Server.