Sun Microsystems Inc. is taking a page from Microsoft Corp.’s security group and changing the way it updates Java for the desktop.
On Tuesday, Sun announced that it will start providing advance notification of its Java SE (Standard Edition) security updates and that it will also scrap its controversial practice of staggering the release of Java patches. Instead, it will release updates for all supported Java SE platforms simultaneously.
Sun spokeswoman Jacki Decoster said that the changes were designed to make it easier for enterprises to patch all of their Java systems at once. But Sun’s new system also happens to remedy what some had called a serious security risk.
In July, eEye Digital Security CTO Marc Maiffret blasted Sun for waiting months between the release of some versions of its desktop Java. In January, Maiffret’s company had discovered a serious bug in the Java Network Launching Protocol, which is used to run Java programs over the Web. But Sun made its fix for the problem available to developers several weeks before it pushed out the update to the Java community at large.
Though this practice gave attackers a chance to reverse-engineer Sun’s security fixes and use them against some of Sun’s 800 million desktop users, surprisingly, the Java platform has only rarely been targeted, said Andrew Storms, director of security operations with nCircle Network Security Inc. “It’s still the number-one platform for IT enterprise development in-house. But we haven’t seen a whole lot of attacks against it.”
Besides staggering developer and end-user releases, Sun would also wait before releasing updates to users of older versions of Java. Previously, it was standard practice for Sun to fix older versions of Java, such as J2SE 5.0 and J2SE 1.4, weeks or even months after it had patched the latest Java SE 6 software.
