Security risks of porting C programs to webassembly

Stiévenart, Quentin; Roover, Coen De; Ghafari, Mohammad

doi:10.1145/3477314.3507308

Cited by 11 publications

(17 citation statements)

References 23 publications

(22 reference statements)

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…We first study projects that are mentioned as top WebAssembly projects to learn about compiler calls and WebAssemblyrelated headers. These projects are listed on LibHunt, 8 Awesome Open Source, 9 and on the Emscripten Wiki page. 10 We develop initial heuristics based on what we learn from these projects and look for them within source code from our NLP-filtered projects.…”

Section: ) Initial Projectsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…We rely on existing checkers and develop new checkers for Clang to analyse our project dataset for occurrences of eight compilation smells. Unlike previous work [9], which has detected these smells on synthetic code examples, we detect the smells in real source code. In addition, we investigate more compilation configuration flags and present the code patterns that indicate these smells.…”

Section: Webassembly Compilation Smells In the Wildmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Compilation smells are indicators of execution differences that can arise between a C program compiled to native x86 code and the same program compiled to WebAssembly. We rely on the same dataset as the original paper [9], namely the Juliet test suite [17], a set of test C and C++ programs that have been designed to exercise and evaluate static application security testing (SAST) tools. We extend the previous work by repeating the experiments with multiple sets of compiler configuration flags.…”

Section: A Compilation Smellsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…To demonstrate an application of this dataset, we investigate compilation smells in WebAssembly, i.e., indication of potentially different behaviour from source to target programs that may yield bugs [9]. In fact, previous work has shown that compilers and standard library implementations available for 1 https://wasi.dev/ WebAssembly are yet not as mature as those used for native compilation, and consequently, certain code patterns may yield different behaviour in these platforms [9], [10]. These different behaviour may yield unexpected bugs lurking around when porting programs to WebAssembly, and more importantly, they may introduce security risks, for example enabling an easier exploitation of binaries suffering from buffer overflows [10].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 4 more Smart Citations

Wasmizer: Curating WebAssembly-driven Projects on GitHub

Nicholson,

Stiévenart,

Mazidi

et al. 2023

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

WebAssembly has attracted great attention as a portable compilation target for programming languages. To facilitate in-depth studies about this technology, we have deployed Wasmizer, a tool that regularly mines GitHub projects and makes an up-to-date dataset of WebAssembly sources and their binaries publicly available. Presently, we have collected 2 540 C and C++ projects that are highly-related to WebAssembly, and built a dataset of 8 915 binaries that are linked to their source projects. To demonstrate an application of this dataset, we have investigated the presence of eight WebAssembly compilation smells in the wild.

show abstract

Section: ) Initial Projectsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Webassembly Compilation Smells In the Wildmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: A Compilation Smellsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 3 more Smart Citations

Wasmizer: Curating WebAssembly-driven Projects on GitHub

Nicholson,

Stiévenart,

Mazidi

et al. 2023

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

BREWasm: A General Static Binary Rewriting Framework for WebAssembly

Cao,

He,

Guo

et al. 2023

Lecture Notes in Computer Science

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

metaSafer: A Technique to Detect Heap Metadata Corruption in WebAssembly

Song,

Park,

Kwon

2023

IEEE Access

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

WebAssembly (Wasm), a technology enabling efficient native code execution in web browsers, has seen a significant rise in adoption as a popular compilation target. This has led to the emergence of lightweight web services powered by Wasm, characterized by their small binary size and reduced data transfer overhead, thanks to the inherent efficiency of Wasm. Despite their lightweight nature, these services can deliver powerful features like image/video processing, AI and graphical application that surpass the capabilities of JavaScript. To ensure lightweight web services and enhance the overall web experience, Wasm has been extensively optimized. However, these optimizations have raised concerns about memory safety, leading to memory-related vulnerabilities. Wasm's characteristic memory structure, linear memory, has vulnerabilities that provide various attack vectors to attackers. In particular, it presents various attack possibilities through metadata modification containing memory structure information. Attackers can exploit heap memory overflow in Wasm applications, allowing them to target arbitrary memory addresses, modify data, or execute arbitrary code. Such overflows can corrupt memory metadata, resulting in incorrect memory behavior. While research has mitigate memory-related weaknesses in languages such as C and C++ and architectures like X86 in recent decades, the direct application of security solutions designed for different domains to Wasm is not a practical approach. Consequently, allocators in Wasm remain vulnerable to issues like heap overflow and metadata corruption. Thus, there is a pressing need for tailored memory safety techniques and solutions that accommodate Wasm's architecture-agnostic and linear memory structures. In this paper, we propose metaSafer as a solution. By shadowing metadata from Wasm linear memory to JavaScript virtual machine memory and conducting metadata verification, metaSafer effectively blocks attack attempts and vectors. Notably, our solution achieves fast memory shadowing and validation while maintaining a small code size. Through various verification processes, we measured the performance and code size of metaSafer, revealing that it is a software-only security solution with no additional hardware requirements. metaSafer demonstrates robust metadata protection for Wasm applications with an acceptable performance overhead of up to 8% in SQLite speed tests and Polybench benchmarks.

show abstract

Security risks of porting C programs to webassembly

Abstract: with details of the nature of the infringement. We will investigate the claim and if justified, we will take the appropriate steps.

Cited by 11 publications

References 23 publications

Wasmizer: Curating WebAssembly-driven Projects on GitHub

Wasmizer: Curating WebAssembly-driven Projects on GitHub

BREWasm: A General Static Binary Rewriting Framework for WebAssembly

metaSafer: A Technique to Detect Heap Metadata Corruption in WebAssembly

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About