Using Digital Signatures to Identify Applets

One of the fundamental assumptions of Java's applet security strategy is that you can't trust anyone on the World Wide Web. Such thinking might sound cynical, but what it means in practice is this: Java security assumes that someone might try to write malicious applets, so it prevents anything malicious from being attempted. As a result, any language feature that has potential for abuse has been blocked from use in applets. The prohibited features include the following:

  • Reading files from the system on which the applet is running

  • Writing files to the system on which the applet is running

  • Getting information about a file on the system

  • Deleting a file on the system

  • Making a network connection to any machine ...

Get Sams Teach Yourself Java 2 in 21 Days, Second Edition now with the O’Reilly learning platform.

O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.