1.7

This release contains mostly dependencies update to address various security issues and a few minor issues.

• update various dependencies with vulnerabilities by @dima-v-v
• address vulnerabilities in Log4j 1.2 by updating to Log4j 2.17.0

Note: I was a bit confused by the versioning of this project (going to 1.7.1, then 1.6.1, then finally 1.7), but I finally settled on a minor release bump and deleted the superfluous tags.