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@frankel@mastodon.top
2026-06-28 16:27:49

This week, I'm happy to welcome a new guest blogger, Peter Firmstone from Down Under 🇦🇺.
He's written a whole series about #security baked into the #JVM. Today's post answers the question: why fork @…

Security Baked Into the JVM: why fork Apache River and OpenJDK?
The more distributed a system, the harder it is to secure. Code crosses JVM boundaries. Objects are serialized across trust boundaries. Third-party proxies run inside your process. The usual answer is a network firewall. It helps, but it operates at the wrong level. Java 17 deprecated the SecurityManager, Java 24 put the final nail in its coffin. Most developers didn’t notice.

@frankel@mastodon.top
2026-08-23 16:15:59

Guest author Peter Firmstone continues to explore and analyze the theme of #Security Baked Into the #JVM.
Today's focus is on multi-Subject dispatch: how up to sixteen user Subjects cross a call on the #JERI…

Security Baked Into the JVM: sixteen Subjects on the wire
Alice calls the order service. The order service calls the ledger on her behalf. At the second hop, the ledger has to decide whose authority the debit is being made under. Most stacks answer badly. Forward Alice’s bearer token verbatim, and the ledger cannot tell her from the service that relayed it. Drop the token and the ledger sees a machine, with no record that a human started the chain. Neither option lets the ledger authorize the combination.

@frankel@mastodon.top
2026-07-19 16:55:05

Guest author Peter Firmstone continues to explore and analyze the theme of #Security Baked Into the #JVM.
Today's focus in on the Safe Codebase #Audit

Security Baked Into the JVM: the Safe Codebase Audit Pipeline
In Part 1, the minimal deployment showed constraints traveling with the proxy: authentication, encryption, hardened deserialization, all declared in configuration and enforced at the call boundary. The proxy is a JAR. That JAR was downloaded and unmarshalled before any constraint ran. That step is the earlier problem. Distributed Java systems that load remote code are vulnerable to supply chain compromise: an attacker can replace a legitimate JAR with one containing malicious bytecode.

@frankel@mastodon.top
2026-07-03 17:15:13

Forking the #JVM to Save #JINI
bytecode.news/posts/2026/06/fo

Forking the JVM to Save JINI
Java stripped out the SecurityManager and offered nothing in its place. Peter Firmstone's answer: fork Apache River and OpenJDK to bring back both JINI and JVM-level authorization. Laudable, even necessary - and a very hard sell, because it runs only on his JDK. It's like a post-mortem for JINI while it's still trying to breathe.

@frankel@mastodon.top
2026-08-09 16:54:35

Guest author Peter Firmstone continues his brilliant series of #Security baked into the #JVM, with his third post: two Subjects, one call
This part covers the two kinds of identity a call carries, how SPIFFE manages process credentials without keystores, and how three identity layers coexist on a singl…

Security Baked Into the JVM: two Subjects, one call
The constraint system stops a bad call before it leaves the JVM. The Safe Codebase Audit Pipeline stops bad code before a client ever loads it. What remains is identity: who is calling, and can you verify it? Most frameworks answer with a token check at the door. A filter validates a bearer token, sets a thread-local variable, and hopes that nothing downstream forgets to look at it. DirtyChai answers differently.

@frankel@mastodon.top
2026-06-06 17:00:10

Endive, a #JVM native #WebAssembly runtime
endive.run/

JVM native WebAssembly runtime | Endive
Endive is a JVM native WebAssembly runtime with zero native dependencies.