[jfoutz]

Oracle JVM is a huge and complicated beast, it's a ridiculous thing to embed in a chip. On the other hand, it's thoroughly tested, and security vulnerabilities are (generally?) fixed in a timely fashion.

A home made, completely un audit able, built in JVM (that apparently can't be updated based on your comments) seems crazy dangerous.

Just saying "it's probably ok, because it's java" as the op alluded to is a very dangerous line of thinking. that only works with one of the public, auditable implementations.

I dunno. it's a the devil you know vs the devil you don't problem. How do you feel about the security of intel software in general?

[paulmd]

To put this another way, JVM as a conceptual processor is pretty solid and I doubt there are many massive errors in the design. Your homebrew JVM implementation certainly may contain errors, and the software built on any JVM almost certainly does.