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 …
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 …
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 …
UPDATED (05/06/08): Fixed problem with loops that zapped examples. UPDATED (06/06/08): Fixed some bugs. In the previous entry, we have looked at a few common attacks on smart cards. In this one, we will look at possible defenses against such attacks. Instead of applying them to our example, we will look at one simple example, …
We now have reached the point where we have a fully functional password manager, which is able to store login information. However, this application is not complete, since it does not include any protection of these sensitive assets. Anybody who is able to select the application and who knows the application’s protocol will be able …
