Testing the Java Card Applet Firewall

In this paper we discuss the methodology and results of testing the Java Card applet firewall mechanism. The main motivation for this work is the complexity of the firewall. Given the complexity, non-compliance of the cards with respect to the official specification is not unlikely. Firewall implementation faults may lead to serious security issues. Although we did not discover any serious problems on our test cards, a few minor specification violations are reported. We only found one specification violation on one card that could be considered unsafe, in that it might introduce a security risk for specific applications.