2021 · 13 citations · 54 references
WebAssembly (Wasm) is a platform-independent bytecode that offers both good performance and runtime isolation. To implement isolation, the compiler inserts safety checks when it compiles Wasm to native machine code. While this approach is cheap, it also requires trust in the compiler's correctness-trust that the compiler has inserted each necessary check, correctly formed, in each proper place. Unfortunately, subtle bugs in the Wasm compiler can break-and have broken-isolation guarantees. To address this problem, we propose verifying memory isolation of Wasm binaries post-compilation. We implement this approach in VeriWasm, a static offline verifier for native x86-64 binaries compiled from Wasm; we prove the verifier's soundness, and find that it can detect bugs with no false positives. Finally, we describe our deployment of VeriWasm at Fastly.
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Efficient software-based fault isolation
Robert Wahbe, Steven Lucco, Thomas E. Anderson et al. · 1993 · 1.2K citations · Full text
Software Maintenance, Engineering, Computer Architecture +19
Formal verification of a realistic compiler
Xavier Leroy · Communications of the ACM · 2009 · 1.1K citations · Full text
Finding and understanding bugs in C compilers
Xuejun Yang, Yang Chen, Eric Eide et al. · 2011 · 714 citations