Enhancing Java Runtime Environment for Smart Cards Against Runtime Attacks

Smart cards are mostly deployed in security-critical environments in order to provide a secure and trusted access to the provisioned services. These services are delivered to a cardholder using the Service Provider's (SPs) applications on his or her smart card(s). These applications are at their most vulnerable state when they are executing. There exist a variety of runtime attacks that can circumvent the security checks implemented either by the respective application or the runtime environment to protect the smart card platform, user and/or application. In this paper, we discuss the Java Runtime Environment and a potential threat model based on runtime attacks. Subsequently, we discussed the counter-measures that can be deployed to provide a secure and reliable execution platform, along with an evaluation of their effectiveness, incurred performance-penalty and latency.