Java Programing

May 30, 2007

option to flag windows created by an untrusted

Filed under: Java Programming — webmaster @ 10:33 pm

option to flag windows created by an untrusted application with a special, recognizable border to prevent it from impersonating another application and perhaps tricking you into revealing your password or your secret recipe collection. There is also a grey area, in which an application can do devious things that aren’t quite destructive. An applet that can mail a bug report can also mail-bomb your boss. The Java language provides the tools to implement whatever security policies you want. However, what these policies will be ultimately depends on who you are, what you are doing, and where you are doing it. 1.6.1 Signing Classes Web browsers such as HotJava start by defining a few rules and some coarse levels of security that restrict where applets may come from and what system resources they may access. These rules are sufficient to keep the waving Duke applet from clutching your password file, but they aren’t sufficient for applications you’d like to trust with sensitive information. To fully exploit the power of Java, we need to have some nontechnical basis on which to make reasonable decisions about what a program can be allowed to do. This nontechnical basis is trust; basically, you trust certain entities not to do anything that’s harmful to you. For a home user, this may mean that you trust the “Bank of Boofa” to distribute applets that let you transfer funds between your accounts, or you may trust L.L. Bean to distribute an applet that debits your Visa account. For a company, that may mean that you trust applets originating behind your firewall, or perhaps applets from a few high-priority customers, to modify internal databases. In all of these cases, you don’t need to know in detail what the program is going to do and give it permission for each operation. You only need to know that you trust your local bank. This doesn’t mean that there isn’t a technical aspect to the problem of trust. Trusting your local bank when you walk up to the ATM means one thing; trusting some web page that claims to come from your local bank means something else entirely. It would be very difficult to impersonate the ATM two blocks down the street (though it has been known to happen), but, depending on your position on the Net, it’s not all that difficult to impersonate a web site, or to intercept data coming from a legitimate web site and substitute your own. That’s where cryptography comes in. Digital signatures, together with certificates, are techniques for verifying that data truly comes from the source it claims to have come from and hasn’t been modified en route. If the Bank of Boofa signs its checkbook applet, your browser can verify that the applet actually came from the bank, not an imposter, and hasn’t been modified. Therefore, you can tell your browser to trust applets that have the Bank of Boofa’s signature. Java supports digital signatures; the details are covered in . 1.7 Java and the World Wide Web The application-level safety features of Java make it possible to develop new kinds of applications that were infeasible before now. A web browser that implements the Java runtime system can incorporate Java applets as executable content inside of documents. This means that web pages can contain not only static hypertext information but also full-fledged interactive applications. The added potential for use of the Web is enormous. A user can retrieve and use software simply by navigating with a web browser. Formerly static information can be paired with portable software for interpreting and using the information. Instead of just providing some data for a spreadsheet, for example, a web document might contain a fully functional spreadsheet application embedded within it that allows users to view and manipulate the information. - 19

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