Coping with Denial of Service due to Malicious Java Applets

A monitoring application, called (Signed) Applet Watch-Dog, is proposed to control the execution of malicious Java applets that users can (download and) execute during Web surfing. Typical security attacks that the monitor can stop are related to denial-of-service and antagonism (e.g., obscuring the screen), at the price of a modest degradation of the performance of the Web browser. The Applet Watch-Dog described here is the second release, improving over the original version presented in [GM98]. The application is a signed Java applet, to be executed outside of the sandbox, simple to use and easily configurable by the user, because it works like a user interface. Signed Applet Watch-Dog seems also a necessary tool for software development environments for Java applets. 1 Introduction Java is the most widely used programming language by Internet programmers. One of the reasons for its success relies upon portability of compiled code (called bytecode) as the basis for mobility of Java ..