Bytecode verification has been an interesting debate since the very beginning of Java Card. Back then, in 1997, Java was very much about Java applets, and the bytecode verifier was the essential piece of software that allowed untrusted code to run in a browser efficiently (i.e., without doing expensive runtime checks, and without having to …
I was not at e-Smart this year, but here are some early reports from colleagues who attended the sessions. Over the coming days, I will comment on a few selected presentations. First, one of my favorite topics, which was covered Friday morning: attacks on the Java Card platform. There were two presentations this morning on …
I just made my second presentation at Cardis2010, about combined attacks on Java Card (joint work with Anthony Ferrari, now in charge of these things at Trusetd Labs). Sorry, no “public” slides this time, this is related to security evaluation. Interestingly, the current presenter is Guillaume Barbu, from Oberthur, who is presenting an interesting attack …
Most of us spent some time in school studying program proofs in a way or another. Many techniques exist, but in most cases, their most important use it to make students understand that, sometimes, a computation does not end. Proving programs is hard, but the hardness of the proof greatly depends on what you want …
That talk, from Guillaume Barbu, an Oberthur and Telecom ParisTech Ph.D. student, really talks to me, by bringing together two of my favorite discussion topics. The main task is about combined attacks, which sounds really good. A Java Card 3.0 card has plenty of countemreasures against logical attacks Context isolation. Objects from an application can’t …
Bruce Schneier has written a blog about the fact that passwords should not be hidden, which has stirred quite an intense controversy (over 100 comments in a few hours). Some of the issues and solutions pointed in the comments are in fact quite interesting. Let’s make a little synthesis here.
Reports about cloning debit cards have been all around, for instance here. The combination of cloning cards and making millions with a fraud scheme instantly makes smart card people happy: we told you that your magstripe cards would lead to big problems! OK. But let’s try to analyze this a bit deeper.
Starting a session Protocol For our session start, we will here use a classical architecture, but with slightly different commands. First, here is a definition of the exchanges between two actors (say, Alice and Bob) to start a secure session: Alice sends a 16-byte random number to a1 … a16 to Bob. Bob replies with …
In the few coming posts, we will define a secure channel protocol from scratch as an example, and provide an implementation for it. This example will also be used as a way to introduce the cryptographic mechanisms that exist in Java Card. Be careful, this is not a tutorial on cryptography. I am not a …
Wojciech Mostowski is a researcher from the Radboud University Nijmegen, and he is a frequent speaker at e-Smart. He even wa a finalist for the Java Card Forum a while ago. He has been spending years looking very closely at the Java Card specifications, trying to find issues in cards. Today, he is getting at …
