Towards the Hardware Accelerated Defensive Virtual Machine - Type and Bound Protection

Abstract. Currently, security checks on Java Card applets are performed by a static verification process before executing an applet. A verified and later unmodified applet is not able to break the Java Card sand-box model. Unfortunately, this static verification process is not a countermeasure against physical run-time attacks corrupting the control or data flow of an applet. In this piece of work, designs for Java Card Virtual Machines are investigated in relation to their ability to perform run-time security checks. These security checks are accelerated by hardware units and performed in parallel to CPU instructions that are executing concurrently. Attacks on the Java operand stack and local variables, which are elementary components for the Virtual Machine, are thwarted by type and bound protection. To enable these hardware checks, different designs of a defensive Java Card Virtual Machine are compared to their overheads on a prototype platform.

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2013
• Where: CARDIS
• Authors: Michael Lackner, Reinhard Berlach, Johannes Loinig, Reinhold Weiss, Christian Steger
• Keywords: CARDIS 2013, Hardware