WebAssembly doesn’t make unsafe languages safe

Re:WebAssembly doesn’t make unsafe languages safe by pjmlp on Sunday November 25, 2018 @04:48PM (#18529274)

If WebAssembly had tagged pointers that could be avoided, as proven by Solaris for SPARC with ADI in production.

Because when something is possible in security attacks, it will eventually be exploited.

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Re:WebAssembly doesn’t make unsafe languages safe by pcwalton on Sunday November 25, 2018 @04:55PM (#18529304)

ADI doesn't seem to me to have enough bits to effectively protect against vtable type confusion.

Besides, nothing stops a wasm compiler from emitting such checks itself, if it wants to.

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Re:WebAssembly doesn’t make unsafe languages safe by pjmlp on Monday November 26, 2018 @12:08AM (#18531210)

Not sure about that, it does seem quite effective, though.

Having the compiler emiting it wouldn't be an option, as hardware enabled solutions seem to be the only ones accepted by C devs, as shown by SPARC and now ARM.

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Re:WebAssembly doesn’t make unsafe languages safe by sitkack on Friday November 30, 2018 @08:23PM (#18574362)

I think there is the possibility of integrating the source maps and the WASM with special purpose execution envs to apply these checks.

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Re:WebAssembly doesn’t make unsafe languages safe by indolering on Monday November 26, 2018 @11:48PM (#18539468)

Wouldn't this require hardware support in the underlying chip or (inevitably) slow emulation of tagged pointers?

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