Hello Stephen ,
Stephen de Vries wrote:
I had the same intuition about the verifier, but have just tested this
and it is not the case. It seems that the -noverify is the default
setting!
Thanks for confirming this (I wonder how many other other Java
developers are aware of this (especially the ones not focused on
security)).
Stephen, do you have any idea of what is the current percentage of 'real
world' Java applications are executed:
a) with verification
b) on a secure sandbox
Note that for example I have seen several Java Based Financial
Applications which are executed on the client which either require local
installation (via setup.exe / App.msi) or require that the user grants
that Java application more permissions that the ones allocated to a
normal Sandboxed browser based Java App.
If you want to verify classes loaded from the local filesystem, then
you need to explicitly add -verify to the cmd line. I tested this by
compiling 2 classes where one accesses a public member of the other.
Then recompiled the other and changed the method access to private.
Tested on:
Jdk 1.4.2 Mac OS X
Jdk 1.5.0 Mac OS X
Jdk 1.5.0 Win XP
all behave the same.
[~/data/dev/applettest/src]java -cp . FullApp
Noone can access me!!
[~/data/dev/applettest/src]java -cp . -verify FullApp
Exception in thread "main" java.lang.IllegalAccessError: tried to
access field MyData.secret from class FullApp at
FullApp.main(FullApp.java:23)
Humm, this is indeed interesting. Ironically, the 1.1 and 2.0 versions
of the CLR will thrown an exception in this case (even in Full Trust).
Since verification is not performed on that .Net Assembly, the CLR might
pick up this information when it is resolving the method's relative
address into the real physical addresses (i.e. during JIT).
Using the same code with an Applet loaded from the filesystem throws
an IllegalAccessError exception as it should.
What do you mean by 'Applet loaded from the filesystem'?
Where? In a Browser?
Best regards
Dinis Cruz
Owasp .Net Project
www.owasp.net
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