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pjmlp

Until it becomes a juicy attack vector, worth exploring monetarily like everything else.

"Everything Old is New Again: Binary Security of WebAssembly"

https://www.usenix.org/conference/usenixsecurity20/presentat...

Just one of the papers slowly coming up on USENIX and other security related conferences.

Want a proper sandbox outside the browser?

Use OS processes, containers and OS IPC.

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If you think using containers provides improved security over WASM I don't think you understood the paper. At no point did they demonstrate compromising the host of the WASM program, just corrupting the state of POC's. There are obviously risks associated with that, but nothing that improves by going with isolated/containerized native code.

Yes currently lacking ASLR and read-only memory sites increase some risks, but strongly typed function pointers, control flow restricted to function entry points and call stack isolation more than make up for it

I think a lot about security, during the last 30 years, and worshiping WASM sales pitch isn't one of them.

Also I explicitly mentioned that is the first paper of many others, that are starting to appear on cyber security conferences.

It's a 4 year old paper, and the biggest issue it brought up, malleable read-only data, is currently being addressed with the memory control proposal. The fact that a virtual environment can't prevent all types of erroneous program behavior is not particularly noteworthy. The fact of the matter, in particular when comparing WASM against containers, WASM is a generational step forward in terms of permissioning and isolation.

For my bonafides, this is me discussing this class of vulnerabilities 8 years ago: https://groups.google.com/g/emscripten-discuss/c/gGjklbJiX1c...

To a degree, everything can be exploited, for sure. Memory safety always remains an issue. The sandboxing I was referring to however was the sandboxing from arbitrary syscalls. While some operating systems have functionality to do so (for example OpenBSD's pledge), this is unfortunately still very much a niche feature.

Containers solve this problem to a degree, but running GUIs or plugins within them is non-trivial for end users.

Or use OS processes etc and WASM sandbox.

Browser engine is a very juicy attack vector. So it makes sense to use browser engines IMO.

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