RFR: 8272875: Change the default key manager to PKIX [v3]

[Daniel Jeliński]

On Tue, 29 Apr 2025 21:51:00 GMT, Artur Barashev <abarashev at openjdk.org> wrote:

>> The current key manager is SunX509, which is configured in the java.security. The SunX509 algorithm does not check the local certificate. The PKIX algorithm should be preferred now so that the default key manager could be more robust.
>> 
>> Compatibility considerations:
>> 
>> 1) Customers using local certificates signed using algorithms prohibited by the default configuration (notably MD5 and SHA1) no longer will be able to use such certificates without modifying algorithm constraints in `java.security` config file.
>> 
>> 2) Performance impact: there is about x2 performance decrease for full (non-resume) TLS handshake:
>> 
>> **SUNX509**
>> Benchmark                                    (resume)  (tlsVersion)   Mode  Cnt      Score     Error  Units
>> SSLHandshake.doHandshake      true       TLSv1.2  thrpt   15  19758.012 ± 758.237  ops/s
>> SSLHandshake.doHandshake      true           TLS  thrpt   15   1861.695 ±  14.681  ops/s
>> SSLHandshake.doHandshake     false       TLSv1.2  thrpt   15   **1186.962** ±  12.085  ops/s
>> SSLHandshake.doHandshake     false           TLS  thrpt   15   **1056.288** ±   7.197  ops/s
>> Finished running test 'micro:java.security.SSLHandshake'
>> 
>> **PKIX**
>> Benchmark                                   (resume)  (tlsVersion)   Mode  Cnt      Score     Error  Units
>> SSLHandshake.doHandshake      true       TLSv1.2  thrpt   15  19724.887 ± 393.636  ops/s
>> SSLHandshake.doHandshake      true           TLS  thrpt   15   1848.927 ±  22.946  ops/s
>> SSLHandshake.doHandshake     false       TLSv1.2  thrpt   15    **511.684** ±   5.405  ops/s
>> SSLHandshake.doHandshake     false           TLS  thrpt   15    **490.698** ±   6.453  ops/s
>> Finished running test 'micro:java.security.SSLHandshake'
>
> Artur Barashev has updated the pull request incrementally with one additional commit since the last revision:
> 
>   Address review comments

This slowdown is seen in the real world. It is concerning, but not easily fixable.

I am not in the TLS server business at the moment, but the cases I used to work with [*] were perfectly well served by SunX509, so I guess some users will just keep using that. The fix for the PKIX+PKCS12 speed is not exactly easy. The options we explored were either incompatible with the existing implementation, or introduced subtle bugs in some corner cases.

[*] The servers I used to work with had either only one certificate, or one RSA and one EC certificate. We had to manually disable the TLS_RSA and TLS_ECDH ciphers, but these are disabled by default today. SunX509 serves that situation pretty well.

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PR Comment: https://git.openjdk.org/jdk/pull/24756#issuecomment-2840918307