Java

UnboundID LDAP SDK for Java 4.0.4

/ Neil Wilson

We have just released the UnboundID LDAP SDK for Java version 4.0.4, available for download from the LDAP.com website, from the releases page of our GitHub repository, from the Files page of our SourceForge project, and from the Maven Central Repository.

There are a few noteworthy changes included in this release. The release notes go into more detail, but the highlights of these changes include:

  • We updated the way that the LDAP SDK generates exception messages to make them more user-friendly. They are now less likely to include stack traces, and they are less likely to include repeated information (like LDAP SDK build information, and information duplicated from an exception’s cause).
  • We fixed an issue that could cause multiple application threads to block in the course of closing a connection pool.
  • We updated the way that the LDAP SDK sends LDAP messages so that it is more resilient to stalls in the TLS negotiation process.
  • We updated the LDAP SDK’s ServerSet implementations so that they can perform authentication and post-connect processing, which can make health checks against newly established connections more reliable.
  • We updated the GetEntryLDAPConnectionPoolHealthCheck class to provide support for invoking the health check after a pooled connection has been authenticated.
  • We fixed a bug in the GetEntryLDAPConnectionPoolHealthCheck class that could cause it to behave incorrectly when checking the validity of a connection after an LDAPException was caught.
  • We updated the Attribute.hasValue method to be more efficient for attributes with multiple values, and especially for attributes with a lot of values or with more complicated matching rules. This will also improve the Filter.matchesEntry method for equality filters that target similar types of attributes.
  • We updated the prompt trust manager to provide better output formatting, and to provide additional warnings about conditions that may make a server certificate chain less trustworthy.
  • We updated the LDAPConnectionOptions class to adjust the initial default connect timeout and operation response timeout, and the default operation response timeout can now be set differently for each type of operation. Most of the default values for options in the LDAPConnectionOptions class can now be set via system properties.

UnboundID LDAP SDK for Java 4.0.3

/ Neil Wilson

Shortly after publishing the 4.0.2 release of the LDAP SDK, we found a bug in the way that we generated and validated signatures for X.509 certificates and PKCS #10 certificate signing requests. So we have just released the 4.0.3 version of the LDAP SDK with just the fix for that bug. As usual, you can get it on LDAP.com, from GitHub, from SourceForge, or from the Maven Central Repository.

UnboundID LDAP SDK for Java 4.0.2

/ Neil Wilson

Happy 20th birthday, LDAPv3! The core LDAPv3 specifications, RFCs 2251 through 2256, were released on December 4, 1997. To celebrate, we’re releasing the UnboundID LDAP SDK for Java version 4.0.2. It is available now for download from the LDAP.com website, from our GitHub repository, from the SourceForge project, or from the Maven Central Repository.

The most significant changes included in this release are:

  • Added a new manage-certificates tool that can be used to interact with JKS and PKCS #12 keystores, generate certificates and certificate signing requests, sign certificates, and perform a number of other certificate-related features. It’s like keytool, but it offers additional functionality, and it’s a lot more user-friendly. The LDAP SDK also provides classes for generating and parsing certificates and certificate signing requests programmatically.
  • Added a new variant of the Entry.diff method that can be used to perform a byte-for-byte comparison of attribute values instead of using the associated attribute syntax. This can help identify changes that result in logically equivalent values, like changing the value of a case-insensitive attribute in a way that only affects capitalization.
  • Added a new PasswordReader.readPasswordChars method that can be used to read a password into a character array. Previously, it was only possible to read a password as a byte array.
  • Added a new LDAPConnection.closeWithoutUnbind method that can be used to close a connection without first sending an LDAP unbind request. While this isn’t usually recommended, it can be useful in cases where the connection is known to be invalid, and especially if there is the potential for sending the unbind request to cause the connection to block.
  • Improved support for validating object identifiers (OIDs). The LDAP SDK now offers a strict validation mode that requires the OID to be comprised of at least two components, that requires the first component to be between zero and two, and that requires the second component to be between zero and thirty-nine if the first component is zero or one. There is also a new OIDArgumentValueValidator class that can be used when requesting command-line arguments whose values are expected to be numeric OIDs.
  • Fixed a bug that could cause the LDAP SDK to leak a connection if it was configured with an SSLSocketVerifier and that verifier rejected the connection for some reason.
  • Fixed a bug that could cause the LDAP SDK to block for twice as long as it should in the event that a failure occurred while trying to send a simple bind request on a connection operating in synchronous mode and the attempt to send the request blocks.
  • Added support for new ASN.1 element types, including bit string, object identifier, generalized time, UTC time, UTF-8 string, IA5 string, printable string, and numeric string. Also added support for a new integer type that is backed by a BigInteger and can support values of any magnitude.
  • Added convenience methods that make it easier to determine the type class and primitive/constructed state of an ASN.1 element.
  • Added support for a new uniqueness request control that can be included in add, modify, and modify DN requests sent to the Ping Identity Directory Server. This control requests that the server identify attribute value conflicts that might arise as a result of the changes performed by the associated operation. The ldapmodify tool has also been updated to support this control.
  • Updated the searchrate tool to make it possible to set the search size limit, time limit, dereference policy, and typesOnly flag.
  • Updated the in-memory directory server to support the UnboundID/Ping-proprietary ignore NO-USER-MODIFICATION request control.
  • Updated the UnboundID/Ping-proprietary password policy state extended operation to make it possible to determine whether the target user has a static password.
  • Updated the argument parser to make it possible to hide subcommand names and argument identifiers so that they can be used but will not appear in generated usage information.
  • Improved the quality of LDAP request debug messages.
  • Updated the set of LDAP-related specifications to include updated versions of existing specifications, and to add a number of certificate-related specifications.

UnboundID LDAP SDK for Java 4.0.1

/ Neil Wilson

The UnboundID LDAP SDK for Java version 4.0.1 has been released. It is available for immediate download from the LDAP.com website, from our GitHub repository, from the SourceForge project, or from the Maven Central Repository.

This release fixes a number of issues and adds a few small features. Some of the most significant changes are:

  • Added a new JVMDefaultTrustManager class that can be used to automatically trust any certificate signed by an authority that the JVM considers trusted by default. The command-line tool framework has been updated so that if you don’t explicitly specify a trust behavior, it will now check the JVM-default trust manager before prompting about whether to trust the server certificate.
  • Updated the in-memory directory server to add support for encoding clear-text passwords using a pluggable mechanism. For example, you can automatically have clear-text passwords transformed so that they are stored as the base64-encoded representation of a salted message digest.
  • Updated the in-memory directory server to indicate which attributes will be treated as password attributes. Any password attribute can be used to provide credentials for a bind operation, and the values of password attributes will be encoded with the configured password encoder (if any). The server was formerly hard-coded to use userPassword as the password attribute, and this is still the default configuration, but it is now possible to configure the server to use one or more other attributes instead of or in addition to userPassword.
  • Added support for a new password update behavior request control. This control can be used in an upcoming release of the Ping Identity Directory Server to override the behavior the server would otherwise have used for a number of password-related properties (e.g., whether the password update is a self change or an administrative reset, whether to allow a pre-encoded password, which password storage scheme to use, etc.). The ldapmodify tool has been updated to make it easy to include this control in add and modify requests.
  • Updated the identify-unique-attribute-conflicts example tool to provide support for identifying conflicts between combinations of attributes. For example, you can use this feature to identify cases in which there may be duplicate uid values within the same organization, but ignore duplicate uid values for users in different organizations.
  • Fixed an OSGi problem in the jar file manifest. When the LDAP SDK supported Java 1.5 or later, the correct value for the Bundle-RequiredExecutionEnvironment property was “J2SE-1.5”. When we updated the LDAP SDK to require Java 7 or later, the value of this property was updated to be “J2SE-1.7” instead of the correct new value of “JavaSE-1.7”.
  • Fixed a problem that prevented the complete set of argument validation from being performed when running a tool in interactive mode. In particular, the interactive mode framework did not perform validation related to required, exclusive, and dependent argument sets.
  • Fixed an issue with the way that command-line tools handled trailing arguments in interactive mode. If the tool didn’t require any trailing arguments but allowed any number of them to be provided, then interactive mode did not allow trailing argument values to be provided.
  • Fixed an issue with the way that relative paths were handled in command-line tools run in interactive mode. When a Java File object is created from a relative path rather than an absolute path, the getParentFile() method may return null, and this could cause the LDAP SDK to incorrectly believe that the file’s parent didn’t exist. To avoid this, the LDAP SDK now uses getAbsoluteFile().getParentFile() in order to get the parent for any File that may have been created from a relative path.
  • Fixed an issue with command-line tools that default to interactive mode that could arise if the tool is invoked without any arguments, but if it tries to use a properties file referenced by an environment variable or JVM property. If the properties file contained some but not all of the arguments needed to invoke the tool, the command-line tool framework would still try to invoke the tool with just the arguments from the properties file, which could result in erratic behavior, unexpected errors, or uncaught exceptions. The tool will now launch in interactive mode to allow the missing arguments to be specified.
  • The ldapsearch tool has been updated so that the base DN argument is now optional in all circumstances. Previously, you had to explicitly provide either a base DN or an LDAP URL file, but this created a usability problem if you ran ldapsearch in interactive mode and wanted to search with a null base DN (that is, the DN with the empty string representation). Now, if you don’t provide either a base DN or an LDAP URL file, then ldapsearch will assume a null base DN.
  • Updated the class-level Javadoc documentation for a number of classes that implement controls and extended requests and responses. If it takes an encoded value, the Javadoc documentation now describes the encoding for that value.
  • Fixed a couple of problems with message format strings that had incorrect property references (for example, they referenced “{1}” when they should have referenced “{0}” as the first argument). The LDAP SDK build process has been updated to better catch these kinds of problems.
  • Improved the ByteStringBuffer.append(CharSequence) method so that it will be much more efficient for CharSequence implementations in which iterating through the characters using the charAt(int) method is expensive.

Important updates about the upcoming 4.0.0 release of the UnboundID LDAP SDK for Java

/ Neil Wilson

TL;DR: The next release of the UnboundID LDAP SDK for Java will have a version number of 4.0.0, will require Java SE 7 or later, and there will be just one edition instead of the three editions that we currently maintain.

Although it’s still at least a month or two away, I wanted to make a couple of announcements about the next release of the UnboundID LDAP SDK for Java that might affect some of its users. These are some significant changes, so we’ll bump the version number to 4.0.0.

We’re going to start updating the LDAP SDK to reflect these changes immediately, but there’s still time before the release, so if you do have any concerns or questions about these changes, then now is the time to raise them. The best way to do that is to send us an email at ldapsdk-support@pingidentity.com. or use the SourceForge project discussion forum.

Requiring Java SE 7 or Later

The first change is that we’re going to require Java SE 7 or later to use the LDAP SDK.

All previous LDAP SDK releases have been compatible with Java SE 5.0 or later, but Java SE 5 is really old. According to http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/eol-135779.html, Oracle stopped providing public updates for it in 2009, and even extended support for it ended in 2015. There are a few things in the SDK that don’t work as well if you’re using Java SE 5, and for which we currently have to use reflection to access on newer VMs.

Dropping support for Java SE 5 allows us to simplify that code and potentially take advantage of new Java features that were added in Java SE 6 and 7. We’ll also be able to update some components that we use during the LDAP SDK build process, although this doesn’t have any impact on your ability to use the SDK. And as always, the LDAP SDK does not and will not depend on anything except Java SE, so you won’t need any third-party libraries to use it.

The older releases of the LDAP SDK aren’t going away, so if you really need to run on Java SE 5.0 or 6 for some reason, then you can continue to use one of the existing releases.

Only Releasing a Single Edition

Another notable change is that we’re only going to be providing a single edition of the LDAP SDK moving forward. Right now, we offer three editions:

  • Standard Edition (SE) — A fully-functional LDAP SDK for use with any type of LDAPv3 directory server.
  • Commercial Edition (CE) — Everything in the Standard Edition, plus additional features specifically intended for use in conjunction with the UnboundID/Ping Identity Directory Server, Directory Proxy Server, and other server products.
  • Minimal Edition (ME) — A very stripped-down version of the LDAP SDK that still provides core LDAPv3 support, but with a focus on keeping a very small jar file for space-constrained environments like Android or embedded systems.

Offering a separate Commercial Edition of the LDAP SDK was necessary in the past because it wasn’t open source and we only made it available to customers who had purchased our server software. But since then, we made it open source and publicly available. There were also concerns about a developer accidentally writing code that leveraged proprietary features that would prevent it from working against non-UnboundID/Ping Identity servers, but that’s easy enough to avoid by just staying away from classes in a package below com.unboundid.ldap.sdk.unboundidds.

Similarly, in the earlier days of Android and other Java-based embedded systems, you didn’t have as much room to work with as you do today, so having a Minimal Edition with a significantly smaller footprint was useful, but it did come at the cost of functionality and convenience. And even the Commercial Edition isn’t all that big (the jar file is around 3.5 megabytes, versus 650 kilobytes for the Minimal Edition, and two megabytes for the Standard Edition).

So from now on, we’re just going to have one edition, and we’ll just call it UnboundID LDAP SDK for Java. It’ll have everything in it that the Commercial Edition has, and it’ll continue to be open source under the terms of the GPLv2 and LGPLv2.1 (plus the UnboundID LDAP SDK Free Use License, which isn’t open source but lets you use and redistribute the LDAP SDK for just about any purpose as long as you don’t make any changes to it). The jar file will be named unboundid-ldapsdk.jar , and we’ll continue to publish it to Maven with a GroupId of com.unboundid and an ArtifactId of unboundid-ldapsdk.

A New LDAPv3 Wire Protocol Reference Guide

/ Neil Wilson

Have you ever wondered what exactly goes into LDAP requests and responses? Have you ever wanted to know what LDAP messages look like as they’re transferred between clients and servers? Have you had the opportunity to admire just how sleek and elegant the ASN.1 Basic Encoding Rules encoding can be? Then look no further.

I’ve created an LDAPv3 Wire Protocol Reference that provides an in-depth look at the encoding for all types of LDAP messages. It covers the complete encoding for all types of LDAPv3 requests and responses, including annotated examples and all the ASN.1 BER that you should need to understand those encodings.

This reference guide will be included in the documentation for the next release of the UnboundID LDAP SDK for Java (and you can get it now in that form by checking out and building the LDAP SDK from the GitHub project), but it’s also available online here.

A Couple of Updates to the LDAP SDK Open Source Repository

/ Neil Wilson

Within the last weeks, there have been a couple of noteworthy changes to the open source repositories for the UnboundID LDAP SDK for Java.

Migrated the GitHub Repository to Ping Identity

The primary open source repository for the LDAP SDK is on GitHub. It used to be part of the UnboundID organization, but over the weekend, I migrated it to the Ping Identity organization (since Ping Identity acquired UnboundID last year). The new URL for the LDAP SDK project on GitHub is https://github.com/pingidentity/ldapsdk.

This should be a completely transparent migration. All of the content (revision history, releases, issues, forks, etc.) should have been preserved. The URLs used to access the repository have changed, but GitHub should redirect all of the old URLs to the new ones, so if you have any links or bookmarks that use the old URLs, you should still end up in the right place. This is also true for any clones of the repository, but if you have checked out the LDAP SDK, then you might want to update your local workspace to the new path. You can do that with the command:

git remote set-url origin git@github.com:pingidentity/ldapsdk.git

If you notice any problems with the repository as a result of the migration (or for any other reason), please open an issue, and we’ll look into it.

And for the record, we also migrated the other public UnboundID repositories to Ping Identity. That includes account-manager, auth-explorer, auth-ui, broker-groovy-sign-in-sample, broker-react-sign-in-sample, my-account, scim, scim2, server-sdk-maven, and status-servlet.

Published the LDAP SDK Unit Tests

When we originally made the LDAP SDK open source, we published everything that you need to build the LDAP SDK, but there was some content from our internal repository that wasn’t made public. The biggest omission from the open source repository was the set of unit tests.

The main reason for omitting the unit tests was that, at the time, most of them required the UnboundID Directory Server (now Ping Identity Directory Server), and that wasn’t publicly available. It was possible to run the tests without a Directory Server instance, but there would be large portions of the code that wouldn’t get covered. But then we updated the LDAP SDK to include the in-memory directory server, and we started using it for most unit tests created after that, so now you can get really good test coverage without an external Directory Server instance.

There are still some tests that will only get run if you have an external Directory Server instance, and if you want to run them, you can download the 6.0.1 release of the Ping Identity Directory Server from https://www.pingidentity.com/en/products/downloads/pingdirectory.html. You’ll need to create an account if you don’t already have one, but that’ll get you access to a free, fully-functional evaluation copy of the Directory Server. The license doesn’t allow you to use the Directory Server for any commercial purpose, but it’s certainly suitable for use in running the unit tests if you so choose.

And with this update, the GitHub repository for the LDAP SDK is now a complete mirror of the internal subversion repository, and we expect to always keep them in sync. At some point, we may make the GitHub the master repository for the LDAP SDK, but at present, there are some internal build processes that rely on our private repository (and rely on subversion rather than git).

UnboundID LDAP SDK for Java 3.2.1

/ Neil Wilson

We have just released the 3.2.1 version of the UnboundID LDAP SDK for Java. It is available for download from the LDAP.com website, as well as from GitHub, SourceForge, or the Maven Central Repository.

You can get a full list of changes included in this release from the release notes. The Commercial Edition release notes also provide information about additional changes only included in the Commercial Edition.

Some of the most significant changes in both the Standard Edition and the Commercial Edition include

  • Updated the documentation to indicate that, as a result of Ping Identity’s acquisition of UnboundID, all non-public feedback, feature enhancements, support requests, and other kinds of communication should now be sent to ldapsdk-support@pingidentity.com instead of ldapsdk-support@unboundid.com. We also now recommend using the GitHub issue tracker over the SourceForge mailing lists and discussion forums for bug reports and feature requests.
  • Fixed a bug in the RDN parsing code that could cause multiple consecutive spaces in the middle of an attribute value to be condensed down to a single space. The string representation of the RDN was preserved correctly, but the methods used to retrieve attribute values as a string or byte array could return values that were missing spaces.
  • Provided better handling for InterruptedException. A thread’s interrupted state will now be preserved for cases in which the LDAP SDK consumes an InterruptedException without doing something to handle it.
  • Fixed a bug in the support for the SASL ANONYMOUS mechanism that could cause the trace string to be omitted from the encoded bind request.
  • Updated the searchrate tool to provide support for generic controls, as well as specific support for the assertion, simple paged results, and server-side sort request controls.
  • Updated the authrate tool to add a new –bindOnly argument that allows you to indicate that the tool should only perform bind operations, rather than a search to find the entry and then a bind as that user. The base DN pattern will be used to construct the bind DN.
  • Updated the authrate tool to provided support for generic search and bind controls, as well as specific support for the authorization identity and password policy request controls.
  • Updated the search-and-modrate tool to provide support for generic search and modify controls, as well as specific support for the assertion, simple paged results, permissive modify, pre-read, and post-read request controls.
  • Added a Schema.getSchema method that can read schema information in LDIF form from an input stream.
  • Updated support for the GSSAPI SASL mechanism to make it possible to indicate in the generated configuration file whether the client should act as an initiator or an acceptor.
  • Updated the identify-unique-attribute-conflicts tool to include a time limit in search requests intended to determine whether a unique attribute value may also be in use in any other entries. This can help limit the effect of running the tool against a server that is not configured with the appropriate indexes needed to ensure that equality searches targeting the unique attributes can be processed efficiently.

Some of the additional changes only available in the Commercial Edition include:

  • Added a new version of the ldapsearch tool that provides a lot of additional functionality over the version provided in the Standard Edition. It includes much better output formatting (including support for alternate output formats like JSON, CSV, and tab-delimited text), support for a number of data transformations, more robust connection handling, support for referrals, support for a large number of search and bind controls, support for administrative sessions, support for unsolicited notifications, the ability to process multiple searches with search criteria provided in filter or LDAP URL files, rate limiting, and the ability to send results to a specified output file (or a separate output file per search).
  • Implemented caching for the matching rule instance used when requesting the jsonObjectExactMatch matching rule. This matching rule only exists in the Commercial Edition and needs to be loaded via reflection.
  • Updated the access and error log parsing APIs to include support for the triggeredByConn and triggeredByOp log fields used to indicate that the message is associated with the indicated operation.

UnboundID LDAP SDK for Java 3.2.0

/ Neil Wilson

We have just released the 3.2.0 version of the UnboundID LDAP SDK for Java. It is available for download via the LDAP.com website or from GitHub, as well as the Maven Central Repository.

You can get a full list of changes included in this release from the release notes (or the Commercial Edition release notes for changes specific to the Commercial Edition). Some of the most significant changes include:

  • Added a new transform-ldif tool that can be used to apply a number of transformations to data in an LDIF file. This includes the ability to scramble, replace, redact, or exclude a specified set of attributes; to replace existing values for a specified attribute; to use a sequential counter for values of a specified attribute; to add a given set of values to entries matching specified criteria; to exclude entries matching specified criteria; to rename attributes; to replace the base DN for entries in a specified subtree; and to flatten a DIT.
  • Updated all classes that offer a public void close() method that doesn’t throw any exceptions other than a possible IOException so that they implement the java.io.Closeable interface. This includes classes like LDAPConnection, LDAPConnectionPool, LDIFReader, LDIFWriter, and all EntrySource implementations. This allows code using these classes to take advantage of the try-with-resources facility introduced in Java SE 7.
  • Added support for parsing entries that contain information about the operations processed in the server for servers that support the syntax described in draft-chu-ldap-logschema-00.
  • Updated the modrate tool to make a number of improvements, including support for a number of controls, the ability to replace multiple values rather than just a single value, or the ability to perform an increment modification rather than a replace modification.
  • Added a new JSONBuffer class that can be used to efficiently construct the string representation of a JSON object, and a JSONObjectReader class that can be used to read JSON objects from an input stream. Added the ability to generate formatted, multi-line string representations of JSON objects with improved human readability.
  • Updated the LDIF reader to make it possible to specify the character set to use when reading data. Updated the LDIF writer to make it possible to automatically include a comment below any base64-encoded values that provides a non-base64-encoded representation (with special characters escaped) of the preceding value.
  • Updated the in-memory directory server to support the LDAP no-operation control as described in draft-zeilenga-ldap-noop-12.
  • Added a new base64 command-line tool that can be used to encode and decode data using the base64 format.
  • Dramatically improved the robustness of the identify-references-to-missing-entries and identify-unique-attribute-conflicts tools.
  • Updated the argument parser to add support for subcommands with their own distinct set of arguments.
  • Added support for timestamp arguments, which can be used to specify timestamps in either the generalized time syntax (including the time zone), or in a number of formats that indicate a time in the local time zone.
  • Updated the command-line tool API to provide the ability to default to interactively prompt for passwords that may be needed but not provided, and to send output to a specified file.
  • Updated the rate adjustor so that generated sample rate files include a number of additional examples for common patterns like square, stairstep, sine, sawtooth, triangle, and hockey stick.

UnboundID LDAP SDK for Java 3.1.1

/ Neil Wilson

We have just released the 3.1.1 version of the UnboundID LDAP SDK for Java. It is available for download via the LDAP.com website or from GitHub, as well as the Maven Central Repository.

This is a relatively minor update release, and you can get a full list of changes from the release notes (or the Commercial Edition release notes for changes specific to the Commercial Edition). Some of the most significant changes include:

  • Updated the AddRequest constructor that allows you to create a request from an LDIF entry. It will now accept an LDIF add change record (including the “changeytpe: add” line, and optionally including controls) in addition to an LDIF entry.
  • Added two new LDAP listener request handler implementations that can be used to limit the load that clients can leverage against a listener. One implementation allows you to limit the number of requests that may be processed concurrently, while the other allows you to limit the overall rate (in operations per second) at which requests may be processed.
  • Fixed a bug in which the LDAP connection pool statistics were not always properly updated for a failed attempt to create a new connection for the pool.
  • Added a new --helpSASL argument for LDAP command-line tools that support authentication. This argument obtains a list of the supported SASL mechanisms and the options that are available for each.
  • Updated the command-line argument parser to provide support for using a properties file to supply the default values for arguments not explicitly provided on the command line. Tools that support this feature now include a --generatePropertiesFile argument that can be used to generate a template with the supported properties for that tool.
  • Updated the command-line argument parser to support grouping related sets of arguments together in the usage information.