Supporting the Secure Deployment of OSGi Bundles

The OSGi platform is a lightweight management layer over a Java virtual machine that makes runtime extensibility and multi-application support possible in mobile and constraint environments. This powerfull capability opens a particular attack vector against mobile platforms: the installation of malicious OSGi bundles. The first countermeasure is the digital signature of the bundles. We developed a tool suite that supports the signature, the publication and the validation of the bundles in an OSGi framework. Our tools support the publication of bundles onto a remote bundle repository as well as the validation of the signature according to the OSGi R4 specifications. A comparison of existing validation mechanisms shows that our security layer is the only one that is compliant with the specification.