Does anyone use X.509 Certificate Authentication for DSpace? We are considering removing it.

[DSpace Technical Support]

All,

The DSpace Committers have been made aware that DSpace's X.509 Certificate Authentication plugin has been unmaintained for many years and appears to be unused.  Therefore, we are considering its removal. 

GitHub Ticket: https://github.com/DSpace/DSpace/issues/11334

Do you use X.509 Certificate Authentication in your DSpace 7.x - 9.x site?  If so, please reach out via this email, or via the GitHub ticket linked above.

If we discover that X.509 Certificate Authentication is still in use by several institutions, we'll do our best to find volunteers to help modernize its code and continue maintain it.  However, if we receive no response, we'll instead work towards a plan to remove it.

Let us know if you have any questions or concerns.

Sincerely,

Tim Donohue, on behalf of the DSpace Committers

[DSpace Technical Support]

All,

Based on the discussion in today's Developers Meeting, we plan to remove X.509 Certificate Authentication in DSpace 7.6.6, 8.3 and 9.2.  

After outreach via mailing lists, Slack and developer meetings, we've not heard of a single institution that uses this old authentication feature.  Additionally, I've attempted to run it locally, and it appears to be non-functional (it seems it may not even be compatible with DSpace 7 and later).

If there are any last minute concerns, please add your feedback in the ticket at https://github.com/DSpace/DSpace/issues/11334

Thanks!

Tim