Abstract. The objective of Java Cards is to protect security-critical code and data against a hostile environment. Adversaries perform fault attacks on these cards to change the control and data flow of the Java Card Virtual Machine. These attacks confuse the Java type system, jump to forbidden code or remove run-time security checks. This work introduces a novel security layer for a defensive Java Card Virtual Machine to counteract fault attacks. The advantages of this layer from the security and design perspectives of the virtual machine are demonstrated. In a case study, we demonstrate three implementations of the abstraction layer running on a Java Card prototype. Two implementations use software checks that are optimized for either memory consumption or execution speed. The third implementation accelerates the run-time verification process by using the dedicated hardware protection units of the Java Card.
Java enabled smart cards protect security-related code and data by a sandbox concept. Unfortunately, this sandbox can be bypassed by fault attacks. Therefore, there is a substantial need for transparent, effective, and low-overhead countermeasures. This work demonstrates a new countermeasure against type confusion and buffer overflow attacks. This new countermeasure is based on obfuscating the security critical calculation parts of a virtual machine by secret keys. This countermeasure was integrated into a Java Card virtual machine running on a smart card prototype. New hardware features were added to this prototype to accelerate the obfuscating operation. The execution time overhead of the new countermeasure is demonstrated by performing run-time measurements on the prototype.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.