Published Release Notes

Improving basic access control

Pega Platform™ has implemented a new basic access control (BAC) to protect your application from unauthorized server calls from otherwise authenticated users.

For more information, see Access Control Checks.

Upgrade impact

After you upgrade to Pega 8.5, all the functionality in the model configurations that use auto-generated controls and actions continues to work as before. However, you must secure any customized JavaScript in your application layer that makes AJAX (server) calls  by using registration or encryption mechanisms.

What steps are required to update the application to be compatible with this change?

After upgrade, to migrate custom JavaScript functionality, see Access Control Checks.

Attribute-based access control model

Attribute-based access control (ABAC) is a security authorization model in which access rights are determined through the use of policies and attributes. A policy decision engine in ABAC evaluates digital policies against available data (attributes) to permit or deny access to the requested resource. For example, you can now determine access rights to cases by examining security attribute values assigned to the user and the case.

For more information, see Attribute-based access control.

Signature Capture control

The Signature Capture control allows you to capture a user's signature when using either a desktop application or a mobile app accessed from the Pega 7 mobile application. Once a user has input a signature, it is added to the work item as an image attachment.

Access the Signature Capture control from the Advanced dropdown in Designer Studio.

See How to use the Signature Capture control.

Address Map control

The Address Map control creates an instance of Google Maps in an application at runtime that can be used in both desktop applications and mobile apps that use the Pega 7 mobile application.

This control allows users to interact with multiple points on a map and see location details, and can display directions and distance between a current position and a specified address.

Access the Address Map control from the Advanced dropdown in Designer Studio.

See How to use the Address Map control.

Access work items directly after login

You can now directly access work items that you receive as email notifications or URLs. The Pega 7 Platform opens the work item after successful user authentication instead of redirecting you to the portal. For a valid user, the type of authentication or number of failed login attempts does not affect this direct access.

For systems that use basic or secure basic authentication, administrators can disable the redirect URL by setting the authentication/basicschemes/redirectToLoginScreen switch to false.

New JWT access token format: Authorized Access Token

Pega Platform™ is changing from using opaque tokens to using JSON Web (JWT) tokens and the JWT access token format: Authorized Access Token (AAT). An AAT enables a client application to validate the server for user permissions and authorizes a specific application to access specific parts of a user’s data.

The major benefits to using the JWT format are:

• The JWT is a self-contained token that has authentication information, expire time information, and other user-defined claims digitally signed.
• A single token can be used with multiple applications.
• The tokens are short-lived and can minimize damage if transport security is compromised, as the token signature is verified.
• As the token is verified with the signature, there is no need to verify against a database, thus reducing latency (usually important for Web APIs).

For more information, see Understanding authorized access tokens.

Control group configuration for predictions

You can now configure a control group for your predictions in Prediction Studio. Based on the control group, Prediction Studio calculates a lift score for each prediction that you can later use to monitor the success rate of your predictions.

For more information, see Customizing predictions.

Limited access for end user portals

The following portals are only accessible from supported versions of Internet Explorer in “quirks” mode:

• WorkUser
• WorkManager

Improved access to Cosmos UI settings

The Settings tab in the App Studio case designer now includes tools for configuring Cosmos UI. With this enhancement, you can adjust design system settings without the need to specialize individual When rules in Dev Studio, which simplifies UI creation and saves development time.

For more information, see Managing Cosmos UI settings in case designer.

Ability to restrict access to the Import wizard

You can now restrict access to the Import wizard so that users implement an automated pipeline to deploy changes between environments such as staging and production. Deployment Manager is one method by which to create pipelines. By using pipelines to propagate changes, users can apply a standardized and automated deployment process for migrating their applications.

For more information, see:

• Ensuring that users migrate applications with a pipeline by restricting the Import wizard
• Understanding model-driven DevOps with Deployment Manager