A Dynamic Syntax Interpretation for Java Based Smart Card to Mitigate Logical Attacks

Off late security problems related to smart cards have seen a significant rise and the risks of the attack are of deep concern for the industries. In this context, smart card industries try to overcome the anomaly by implementing various countermeasures. In this paper we discuss and present a powerful attack based on the vulnerability of the linker which could change the correct byte code into malicious one. During the attack, the linker interprets the instructions as tokens and are able to resolve them. Later we propose a countermeasure which scrambles the instructions of the method byte code with the Java Card Program Counter (jpc). Without the knowledge of jpc used to decrypt the byte code, an attacker cannot execute any malicious byte code. By this way we propose security interoperability for different Java Card platforms.