What’s new

Web Agent 2023.9 supports the following additional platforms:

For more information, refer to Supported operating systems and web servers Web Agent 2023.9.

Apache Web Agent can now be configured with the following Apache directives, globally or independently for different server locations:

For more information, refer to Configure Apache Web Agent.

Web Agent agents are automatically authenticated to Identity Cloud and AM by a non-configurable authentication module. Authentication chains and modules are deprecated and replaced by nodes, trees, and journeys.

You can now authenticate Web Agent to Identity Cloud and AM 7.3 with a journey. The procedure is currently optional, but will be required when authentication chains and modules are removed in a future release.

For more information, refer to Authenticate agents to Identity Cloud and Authenticate agents to AM.

An encryption key in agent.conf is used to decrypt credentials for the agent profile, the SSL certificate, and the HTTP proxy. By default, the agent caches the encryption key. A new property Disable Caching of Agent Profile Password Encryption Key is available to disable caching and require the agent to securely wipe the encryption key after it is read.

Use the agentadmin --V command to verify that the agent can decrypt the credentials correctly.

The NGINX Plus R29 platform is available in this release.

In IIS, the agent can now remove the Server header from all responses. To enable the feature, set the Remove IIS HTTP Server Header property (org.forgerock.agents.config.iis.headers.server.disable) to true.

To help manage the amount of stored data, the new property Maximum Number of Debug Log Files is now available to limit the number of rotated log files that the agent stores.

Apache Web Agent now supports SUSE Linux Enterprise 15.

In Apache Web Agent, it is now possible to cause the agent error logs to appear in the Apache log system. For more information, refer to Configure error logs.

In IIS, the agent can now remove the Server header from all responses. To enable the feature, set the Remove IIS HTTP Server Header property (org.forgerock.agents.config.iis.headers.server.disable) to true.

To help manage the amount of stored data, the new property Maximum Number of Debug Log Files is now available to limit the number of debug log files that the agent stores after file rotation.

The wildcard * can now be used in FQDN Virtual Host Map. to match a domain name. Use this feature to pass requests with dynamically allocated hostnames, for example, in Kubernetes deployments, without redirecting them to another domain.

For more information, see FQDN checking.

Authorization flow for applications using Javascript is a new property to enable callbacks into JavaScript applications, after an authentication or transactional authorization journey.

The property provides support for single page applications (SPAs) that use embedded login or authorization dialogs within iframes or embedded tags.

This feature is in Technology Preview, as defined in Release levels and interface stability, for use only with assistance from Forgerock.

Current limitations:

Use Built-in Apache HTTPD Authentication Directives is a new property to enable Apache Web Agent to use built-in Apache authentication directives, such as AuthName, FilesMatch, and Require for specified not-enforced URLs.

In previous releases, use of built-in Apache authentication directives was not supported. The agent replaced authentication functionality provided by Apache.

In previous releases, to correctly configure POST data preservation, a separate agent profile was required in AM for each agent instance. From this release, a single agent profile can be used for multiple agent instance.

Use this feature for scalable deployments, where resources are dynamically created or destroyed.

For more information, see Create an agent profile for multiple agent instances when POST data preservation is enabled and Map one agent profile to multiple agent instances when POST data preservation is enabled.

When the value of Enable Custom Login Mode is 2, URI fragments were previously lost during login. From this release, URI fragments in the browser are not lost after the custom login procedure.

In previous releases, the pre-authentication cookie, agent-authn-tx, expired when it reached the age configured by Profile Attributes Cookie Maxage. From this release, the pre-authentication cookie expires when the first of the following events occur:

Expiring the cookie immediately after authentication reduces the amount of used header space, and prevents authentication errors and errors in applications that set headers.

The maximum size to which a compressed JWT can be decompressed is now limited to 1 MB, and is not configurable. This change reduces the risk of memory exhaustion DOS by reducing the risk of a decompressed JWT consuming too much available memory.

In previous releases, the pre-authentication cookie, agent-authn-tx, expired when it reached the age configured by Profile Attributes Cookie Maxage. From this release, the pre-authentication cookie expires when the first of the following events occur:

Expiring the cookie immediately after authentication reduces the amount of used header space, and prevents authentication errors and errors in applications that set headers.

When the value of Enable Custom Login Mode is 2, URI fragments were previously lost during login. From this release, URI fragments in the browser are not lost after the custom login procedure.

In previous releases, to correctly configure post data preservation, a separate agent profile was required in AM for each agent instance. From this release, a single agent profile can be used for multiple agent instance.

Use this feature for scalable deployments, where resources are dynamically created or destroyed. For more information, see Create an Agent Profile for Multiple Agent Instances When POST Data Preservation is Enabled and Map One Agent Profile to Multiple Agent Instances When POST Data Preservation is Enabled.

The NGINX Plus R25 platform is available in this release.

Retain Session Cache After Configuration Change is a new property to stop the agent from purging the session cache each time the agent configuration is changed. Use this property to prevent the agent from flooding AM instances with requests, when the agent configuration changes regularly, and the changes do not affect the agent authorisation decisions.

The following properties can now take multiple values:

The agent reads its configuration from AM in the following situations:

If the AM server is flooded with requests from the agent, it can become unresponsive, causing the agents to stop functioning normally and refuse access.

In previous releases, after a configuration update each request thread retrieved the new configuration, and re-authenticated with AM.

In this release, a single request thread retrieves the new configuration, and re-authenticates with AM only if necessary. Concurrent request threads wait for the time specified by TCP Receive Timeout for the retrieving request thread to complete, and then they use the new configuration.