A Redundancy-Based Attack Detection Technique for Java Card Bytecode

A Java Card Virtual Machine applet running on smart cards may be subject to tampering. We protect existing applets by encoding additional lists representing specific instructions which may be the targets of a variety of attacks. The lists are specifically encoded to be a viable solution in limited smart cards hardware. Our modified virtual machine before executing a fetched instruction checks the lists to verify that it has not been modified, blocking the execution if a modification is detected.