Malicious Code on Java Card Smartcards: Attacks and Countermeasures

When it comes to security, an interesting difference between Java Card and regular Java is the absence of an on-card bytecode verifier on most Java Cards. In principle this opens up the possibility of malicious, ill-typed code as an avenue of attack, though the Java Card platform offers some protection against this, notably by code signing. This paper gives an extensive overview of vulnerabilities and possible runtime countermeasures against ill-typed code, and describes results of experiments with attacking actual Java Cards currently on the market with malicious code. 1 Overview A huge security advantage of type safe language such as Java is that the low level memory vulnerabilities, which plague C/C++ code in the form of buffer overflows, are in principle ruled out. Also, it allows us to make guarantees about the behaviour of one piece of code, without reviewing or even knowing all the other pieces of code that may be running on the same machine. However, on Java Card smartcards [9]...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2008
• Where: CARDIS
• Authors: Wojciech Mostowski, Erik Poll
• Keywords: CARDIS 2008, Hardware, Ill-typed Code, Java Card, Java Card Platform