Unsafe Blocks

Unsafe Blocks

Ah, you are referring to exploits using parts of the Java standard library which wrap unsafe code or buggy type casts. I agree, there is a lot of garbage in there. I would have expected applets or other sandboxed code to be restricted to a safe subset of the library, but apparently not.

I was thinking of Java the language, where admittedly there have been several bytecode verification bugs, but the core sandboxing model seems reasonably sound.

Of course, though, security depends not just on the theoretical model but on the quality of implementation all the way through the stack, and there Java falls short.