Monday, May 14, 2018

Three New JEPs Targeted for JDK 11

Three new JEPs were targeted for JDK 11 a week ago today (7 May 2014). In three separate messages on the jdk-dev mailing list, Mark Reinhold made the following announcements:

JEP 324: Key Agreement with Curve25519 and Curve448

The "Summary" section of JEP 324 ("Key Agreement with Curve25519 and Curve448") states, "Implement key agreement using Curve25519 and Curve448 as described in RFC 7748." The Curve25519 entry on Wikipedia has an opening paragraph that makes it clear why this particular elliptic curve is well-suited as an addition to the JDK. It states that "Curve25519 is an elliptic curve offering 128 bits of security" that is "designed for use with the elliptic curve Diffie–Hellman (ECDH) key agreement scheme and is one of the fastest ECC curves and is not covered by any known patents." It adds that "the reference implementation is public domain software."

D. J. Bernstein provides a more specific and approachable summary of the value of Curve25519: "Given a user's 32-byte secret key, Curve25519 computes the user's 32-byte public key. Given the user's 32-byte secret key and another user's 32-byte public key, Curve25519 computes a 32-byte secret shared by the two users. This secret can then be used to authenticate and encrypt messages between the two users."

RFC 7748 ("Elliptic Curves for Security") is a memo provided by the Internet Research Task Force (IRTF) that "specifies two elliptic curves [curve25519 and curve448] over prime fields that offer a high level of practical security in cryptographic applications, including Transport Layer Security (TLS), and that are "intended to operate at the ~128-bit and ~224-bit security level, respectively, and are generated deterministically based on a list of required properties."

The "primary goal" of JEP 324 is to provided "an API and an implementation for [the RFC 7748] standard," the two additional goals are also spelled out. One of the additional goals is to provide "a platform-independent, all-Java implementation with better performance than the existing ECC (native C) code at the same security strength."

Current plans for JEP 324 only involve an RFC implementation in the SunEC elliptic curve cryptography provider. However, with an API provided ("XDH"), it seems possible for other ECC providers to implement RFC 7748 as desired. JEP 324 currently adds this important note: "This new library will be in an internal JDK package, and will only be used by new crypto algorithms."

JEP 327: Unicode 10

JEP 327 ("Unicode 10") provides a straightforward "Summary": "Upgrade existing platform APIs to support version 10.0 of the Unicode Standard." The WikiBooks entry "Unicode/Versions" lists each major version of Unicode from Unicode 1.0 through Unicode 12.0. Unicode 10 was released last summary and Unicode 11 is planned for next month.

An early history/mapping of Java versions to Unicode versions is provided in "Unicode Versions Supported in Java-History," which shows Unicode 1.1.5 associated with JDK 1.0 through Unicode 6.0 associated with JDK 7. Unicode 6.2.0 was supported by JDK 8, Unicode 8.0.0 was supported by JDK 9 and JDK 10, so JDK 11 will add support for both Unicode 9.0 and Unicode 10.0.

JEP 327 explicitly lists "four related Unicode specifications" (Unicode Technical Standards) that "will not be implemented" as part of JEP 327. These are UTS #10 ("Unicode Collation Algorithm"), UTS #39 ("Unicode Security Mechanisms"), UTS #46 ("Unicode IDNA Compatibility Processing"), and UTS #51 ("Unicode Emoji").

JEP 328: Flight Recorder

JEP 328 ("Flight Recorder") aims to "provide a low-overhead data collection framework for troubleshooting Java applications and the HotSpot JVM." In its "Motivation" section, this JEP states, "Flight Recorder records events originating from applications, the JVM and the OS. Events are stored in a single file that can be attached to bug reports and examined by support engineers, allowing after-the-fact analysis of issues in the period leading up to a problem. Tools can use an API to extract information from recording files."

The current Java Mission Control page describes Java Flight Recorder and its relationship to Java Mission Control:

Java Flight Recorder and Java Mission Control together create a complete tool chain to continuously collect low level and detailed runtime information enabling after-the-fact incident analysis. Java Flight Recorder is a profiling and event collection framework built into the Oracle JDK. It allows Java administrators and developers to gather detailed low level information about how the Java Virtual Machine (JVM) and the Java application are behaving. Java Mission Control is an advanced set of tools that enables efficient and detailed analysis of the extensive of data collected by Java Flight Recorder. The tool chain enables developers and administrators to collect and analyze data from Java applications running locally or deployed in production environments.

This JEP is another step in achieving the announcement made last September that "Oracle will also open source commercial features such as Java Flight Recorder previously only available in the Oracle JDK." Marcus Hirt announced just this month that Java Mission Control has been open sourced with repositories available at http://hg.openjdk.java.net/jmc.

Summary

The three JEPs highlighted in this post now bring the number of JEPs currently associated with JDK 11 to a total of eight:

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