By default, the Verifier is disabled on .Net and Java

[gem at cigital.com (Gary McGraw)]

An interesting experiment on cracking verifiers was performed about ten years ago by brian bershad at the university of 
washington.  The paradigm used comparative testing on multiple verifiers to find discrepancies.  

This is covered in securing java as well.

Funny how I became interested in software security because of java security.  We're coming full circle.

gem
www.cigital.com/~gem
www.swsec.com

 -----Original Message-----
From:   Stephen de Vries [mailto:stephen at corsaire.com]
Sent:   Fri May 05 10:06:36 2006
To:     David Eisner
Cc:     'Secure Coding Mailing List'
Subject:        Re: [SC-L] By default, the Verifier is disabled on .Net and Java

David Eisner wrote:

<snip some good research>
> What determines when access to a private member is illegal?  Is it, in
> fact, the bytecode verifier? 

Yes, it's done by the fourth pass of the verifier as described here:
http://java.sun.com/sfaq/verifier.html#HEADING13

Interestingly, Sun have posted a contest to try and crack the new
verifier in Mustang:  https://jdk.dev.java.net/CTV/learn.html


-- 
Stephen de Vries
Corsaire Ltd
E-mail: stephen at corsaire.com
Tel:    +44 1483 226014
Fax:    +44 1483 226068
Web:    http://www.corsaire.com
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