In two succeeding versions, Lion and Mountain Lion, Apple moved some applications to a highly skeuomorphic style of design inspired by contemporary versions of iOS while simplifying some elements by making controls such as scroll bars fade out when not in use.[22] This direction was, like brushed metal interfaces, unpopular with some users, although it continued a trend of greater animation and variety in the interface previously seen in design aspects such as the Time Machine backup utility, which presented past file versions against a swirling nebula, and the glossy translucent dock of Leopard and Snow Leopard.[38] In addition, with Mac OS X 10.7 Lion, Apple ceased to release separate server versions of Mac OS X, selling server tools as a separate downloadable application through the Mac App Store. A review described the trend in the server products as becoming "cheaper and simpler... shifting its focus from large businesses to small ones."[39]
In this release, the behavior of methods which application code uses to set request properties in java.net.HttpURLConnection has changed. When a redirect occurs automatically from the original destination server to a resource on a different server, then all such properties are cleared for the redirect and any subsequent redirects. If these properties are required to be set on the redirected requests, then the redirect responses should be handled by the application by calling HttpURLConnection.setInstanceFollowRedirects(false) for the original request.
Note that there may be situations where some applications that were previously able to successfully connect to an LDAPS server may no longer be able to do so. Such applications may, if they deem appropriate, disable endpoint identification using a new system property: com.sun.jndi.ldap.object.disableEndpointIdentification.
Support has been added for the TLS session hash and extended master secret extension (RFC 7627) in JDK JSSE provider. Note that in general, a server certificate change is restricted if endpoint identification is not enabled and the previous handshake is a session-resumption abbreviated initial handshake, unless the identities represented by both certificates can be regarded as the same. However, if the extension is enabled or negotiated, the server certificate changing restriction is not necessary and will be discarded accordingly. In case of compatibility issues, an application may disable negotiation of this extension by setting the System Property jdk.tls.useExtendedMasterSecret to false in the JDK. By setting the System Property jdk.tls.allowLegacyResumption to false, an application can reject abbreviated handshaking when the session hash and extended master secret extension are not negotiated. By setting the System Property jdk.tls.allowLegacyMasterSecret to false, an application can reject connections that do not support the session hash and extended master secret extension.
This release disables server side HTTP-tunneled RMI connections by default. The previous behavior can be re-enabled after due consideration of any impact by setting the runtime property sun.rmi.server.disableIncomingHttp to false. Note that this should not be confused with the sun.rmi.server.disableHttp property, which disables HTTP-tunneling on the client side and is false by default.
New public attributes, RMIConnectorServer.CREDENTIALS_FILTER_PATTERN and RMIConnectorServer.SERIAL_FILTER_PATTERN have been added to RMIConnectorServer.java. With these new attributes, users can specify the deserialization filter pattern strings to be used while making a RMIServer.newClient() remote call and while sending deserializing parameters over RMI to server respectively.
Timeouts used by the FTP URL protocol handler have been changed from infinite to 5 minutes. This will result in an IOException from connect and read operations if the FTP server is unresponsive. For example, new URL(" ").openStream().read(), will fail with java.net.SocketTimeoutException in case a connection or reading could not be completed within 5 minutes.
Any TLS server certificate chain containing a SHA-1 certificate (end-entity or intermediate CA) and anchored by a root CA certificate included by default in Oracle's JDK is now blocked by default. TLS Server certificate chains that are anchored by enterprise or private CAs are not affected. Only X.509 certificate chains that are validated by the PKIX implementation of the CertPathValidator and CertPathBuilder APIs and the SunX509 and PKIX implementations of the TrustManagerFactory API are subject to the restrictions. Third-party implementations of these APIs are directly responsible for enforcing their own restrictions.
A new constraint named usage, that when set, restricts the algorithm if it is used in a certificate chain for the specified use(s). Three usages are initially supported: TLSServer for TLS/SSL server certificate chains, TLSClient for TLS/SSL client certificate chains, and SignedJAR for certificate chains used with signed JARs.
If not specified, the message digest algorithm for the -tsadigestalg option of jarsigner will default to SHA-256 (previously it was SHA-1). The -tsadigestalg option specifies the message digest algorithm that is used to generate the message imprint to be sent to the TSA server.
When connecting to an HTTP server that uses SPNEGO to negotiate authentication, and when connection and authentication with the server is successful, the authentication information will then be cached and reused for further connections to the same server. In addition, connecting to an HTTP server using SPNEGO usually involves keeping the underlying connection alive and reusing it for further requests to the same server. In some applications, it may be desirable to disable all caching for the HTTP SPNEGO (Negotiate/Kerberos) protocol in order to force requesting new authentication with each new request to the server.
On some platforms, the HTTP NTLM implementation in the JDK can support transparent authentication, where the system user credentials are used at system level. When transparent authentication is not available or unsuccessful, the JDK only supports getting credentials from a global authenticator. If connection to the server is successful, the authentication information will then be cached and reused for further connections to the same server. In addition, connecting to an HTTP NTLM server usually involves keeping the underlying connection alive and reusing it for further requests to the same server. In some applications, it may be desirable to disable all caching for the HTTP NTLM protocol in order to force requesting new authentication with each new requests to the server.
The issue can arise when the server doesn't have elliptic curve cryptography support to handle an elliptic curve name extension field (if present). Users are advised to upgrade to this release. By default, JDK 7 Updates and later JDK families ship with the SunEC security provider which provides elliptic curve cryptography support. Those releases should not be impacted unless security providers are modified.
A new -tsadigestalg option is added to jarsigner to specify the message digest algorithm that is used to generate the message imprint to be sent to the TSA server. In older JDK releases, the message digest algorithm used was SHA-1. If this new option is not specified, SHA-256 will be used on JDK 7 Updates and later JDK family versions. On JDK 6 Updates, SHA-1 will remain the default but a warning will be printed to the standard output stream.
A new java attribute has been defined for the environment to allow a JMX RMI JRMP server to specify a list of class names. These names correspond to the closure of class names that are expected by the server when deserializing credentials. For instance, if the expected credentials were a List, then the closure would constitute all the concrete classes that should be expected in the serial form of a list of Strings.
In the JDK SSL/TLS implementation (SunJSSE provider), safe prime Diffie-Hellman groups are used by default. Users can customize Diffie-Hellman groups with the security property, "jdk.tls.server.defaultDHEParameters".
RC4 is now considered as a compromised cipher. RC4 cipher suites have been removed from both client and server default enabled cipher suite list in Oracle JSSE implementation. These cipher suites can still be enabled by SSLEngine.setEnabledCipherSuites() and SSLSocket.setEnabledCipherSuites() methods.
Starting with JDK 6u85, unsafe server certificate change in SSL/TLS renegotiations is not allowed by default. Server certificate change in an SSL/TLS renegotiation may be unsafe and should be restricted:
If unsafe server certificate change is really required, please set the system property, jdk.tls.allowUnsafeServerCertChange, to "true" before JSSE is initialized. Note that this would re-establish the unsafe server certificate change issue.