[db-wg] Upcoming work by the RIPE NCC Database team

Dear working group,

Following working group discussions in different threads we would like to give you a quick overview of current and planned work.

1= SSO integration in Webupdates

As you may know we have been working on this in the background for a while. The objective of this effort is to improve the integration of SSO with Webupdates. Where previously we were asking users to provide plain text (MD5) passwords, and storing them in the session, we now want to encourage everyone to use their SSO account instead.

We expect that we will finish this work 2-3 weeks from now, and plan to deploy a new release 1.81 to the RC environment then.

2= Changed phase 3 - deprecating "changed:"

We plan to work on this as soon as the SSO release is deployed to the RC environment. We we expect that we can have a release 1.82 for this ready for testing in the RC environment by the end of September. As mentioned before, because the impact of this change can be bigger than usual, we plan to have this release in RC for testing for 6 weeks before deploying it to production.

3= Descr

We don't foresee major technical issues with the options being discussed currently, but can only present a definite implementation plan when consensus is reached on this. If consensus is reached in time, it may be an option to postpone the release of 1.82 above and have a bigger release that also includes this work - to avoid delays because of the long RC period required for that release.

4= Personalized Authorization

We are very happy to have a mandate from the chairs to work on a proof of concept for personalised authentication. We look forward to implementing this as soon as we have the opportunity and working closely with the working group using the RC environment. In addition to core whois changes we will also deploy improvements to Webupdates in the RC environment when we work on this - to exemplify how we can make use of this to improve usability. 



Kind regards

Tim Bruijnzeels

Assistant Manager Software Engineering
RIPE NCC