Oracle recommends that the JDK is updated with each Critical Patch Update. In order to determine if a release is the latest, the Security Baseline page can be used to determine which is the latest version for each release family.

Critical patch updates, which contain security vulnerability fixes, are announced one year in advance on Critical Patch Updates, Security Alerts and Bulletins. It is not recommended that this JDK (version 8u341) be used after the next critical patch update scheduled for October 18, 2022.

Java SE Subscription customers managing JRE updates/installs for large number of desktops should consider using Java Advanced Management Console (AMC).

For systems unable to reach the Oracle Servers, a secondary mechanism expires this JRE (version 8u341) on 2022-11-18. After either condition is met (new release becoming available or expiration date reached), the JRE will provide additional warnings and reminders to users to update to the newer version. For more information, see 23.1.2 JRE Expiration Date in the Java Platform, Standard Edition Deployment Guide.

The TLSv1.3 implementation is available in JDK 8u from 8u261 and enabled by default for server roles but disabled by default for client roles. From this release onwards, TLSv1.3 is now also enabled by default for client roles. You can find more details in the Additional Information section of the Oracle JRE and JDK Cryptographic Roadmap.

Note that TLS 1.3 is not directly compatible with previous versions. Enabling it on the client may introduce compatibility issues on either the server or the client side. Here are some more details on potential compatibility issues that you should be aware of:

• TLS 1.3 uses a half-close policy, while TLS 1.2 and prior versions use a duplex-close policy. For applications that depend on the duplex-close policy, there may be compatibility issues when upgrading to TLS 1.3.
• The signature_algorithms_cert extension requires that pre-defined signature algorithms are used for certificate authentication. In practice, however, an application may use non-supported signature algorithms.
• The DSA signature algorithm is not supported in TLS 1.3. If a server is configured to only use DSA certificates, it cannot upgrade to TLS 1.3.
• The supported cipher suites for TLS 1.3 are not the same as TLS 1.2 and prior versions. If an application hard-codes cipher suites which are no longer supported, it may not be able to use TLS 1.3 without modifying the application code, for example TLS_AES_128_GCM_SHA256 (1.3 and later) versus TLS_ECDHE_RSA_WITH_AES_128_CBC_SHA (1.2 and earlier).
• The TLS 1.3 session resumption and key update behaviors are different from TLS 1.2 and prior versions. The compatibility should be minimal, but it could be a risk if an application depends on the handshake details of the TLS protocols.
• TLS 1.3 requires that the implementation support new cryptographic algorithms which previous versions of TLS did not, such as RSASSA-PSS. If your application is configured to use 3rd party JCE provider(s) which do not support the required algorithms, you may get handshake failures.

Support has been added for TLS channel binding tokens for Negotiate/Kerberos authentication over HTTPS through javax.net.HttpsURLConnection.

Channel binding tokens are increasingly required as an enhanced form of security. They work by communicating from a client to a server the client's understanding of the binding between connection security (as represented by a TLS server cert) and higher level authentication credentials (such as a username and password). The server can then detect if the client has been fooled by a MITM and shutdown the session/connection.

The feature is controlled through a new system property `jdk.https.negotiate.cbt` which is described fully as below:

jdk.https.negotiate.cbt (default: "never")

This controls the generation and sending of TLS channel binding tokens (CBT) when Kerberos or the Negotiate authentication scheme using Kerberos are employed over HTTPS with HttpsURLConnection. There are three possible settings:

• "never". This is also the default value if the property is not set. In this case, CBTs are never sent.
• "always". CBTs are sent for all Kerberos authentication attempts over HTTPS.
• "domain:" Each domain in the list specifies destination host or hosts for which a CBT is sent. Domains can be single hosts like foo, or foo.com, or literal IP addresses as specified in RFC 2732, or wildcards like *.foo.com which matches all hosts under foo.com and its sub-domains. CBTs are not sent to any destinations that don't match one of the list entries

The channel binding tokens generated are of the type "tls-server-end-point" as defined in RFC 5929.

The java.net.InetAddress class has been updated to strictly accept IPv4 address literals in decimal quad notation. The InetAddress class methods are updated to throw an java.net.UnknownHostException for invalid IPv4 address literals. To disable this check, the new "jdk.net.allowAmbiguousIPAddressLiterals" system property can be set to "true".

On oracle.com and java.com, certain JDK bundle extensions are getting truncated on download when using Firefox version 102. The downloaded bundles have no file extension like ".exe", ".rpm", ".deb". If you are not able to upgrade to Firefox ESR 102.0.1 or Firefox 103 when it is released, then as a workaround you can:

• manually add a file extension to the file name after download.
• use a different browser

java.util.Vector is updated to correctly report ClassNotFoundException that occurs during deserialization using java.io.ObjectInputStream.GetField.get(name, object) when the class of an element of the Vector is not found. Without this fix, a StreamCorruptedException is thrown that does not provide information about the missing class.

DeflaterOutputStream.close() and GZIPOutputStream.finish() methods have been modified to close out the associated default JDK compressor before propagating a Throwable up the stack. ZIPOutputStream.closeEntry() method has been modified to close out the associated default JDK compressor before propagating an IOException, not of type ZipException, up the stack.