Digital signatures allow us to produce documents whose integrity and authenticity, as we generated them, is verifiable by anybody who has access to our public key. Furthermore, we cannot repudiate those documents as something we never saw, let alone signed, since nobody else but us could access our private key. We show how the previous statement can be proved wrong when carefully crafted malicious software is installed on a machine running a Java digital signature application. By using such a software, a user may unwittingly sign another document besides the one he/she intends to digitally sign or sign a different document altogether. Our attack exploits a known vulnerability of the security architecture of the Java run-time environment that allows nonJava malicious software to replace some Java system classes with malicious ones, which then alter the victim application behavior.

How to unwittingly sign non-repudiable documents with Java applications / D. Bruschi, D. Fabris, V. Glave, E. Rosti - In: 19th Annual Computer Security Applications Conference : proceedings : 8-12 December, 2003, Las Vegas, NevadaLos Alamitos : IEEE Computer Society, 2003 Dec. - ISBN 0769520413. - pp. 192-196 (( Intervento presentato al 19. convegno Annual Computer Security Applications Conference (ACSAC) tenutosi a Las Vegas nel 2003.

How to unwittingly sign non-repudiable documents with Java applications

D. Bruschi
Primo
;
D. Fabris
Secondo
;
V. Glave
Penultimo
;
E. Rosti
Ultimo
2003

Abstract

Digital signatures allow us to produce documents whose integrity and authenticity, as we generated them, is verifiable by anybody who has access to our public key. Furthermore, we cannot repudiate those documents as something we never saw, let alone signed, since nobody else but us could access our private key. We show how the previous statement can be proved wrong when carefully crafted malicious software is installed on a machine running a Java digital signature application. By using such a software, a user may unwittingly sign another document besides the one he/she intends to digitally sign or sign a different document altogether. Our attack exploits a known vulnerability of the security architecture of the Java run-time environment that allows nonJava malicious software to replace some Java system classes with malicious ones, which then alter the victim application behavior.
Settore INF/01 - Informatica
dic-2003
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Utilizza questo identificativo per citare o creare un link a questo documento: https://hdl.handle.net/2434/258871
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