Re:Firefox's low-latency WebAssembly compiler
by saagarjha on Friday March 27, 2020 @03:56AM
(#22701079)
I’m well aware of hardware support for enforcing memory safety, but that’s not quite what I’m talking about here: browser plugins have historically been poorly sandboxed, while WebAssembly should be an improvement in this area.
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Re:Firefox's low-latency WebAssembly compiler
by pjmlp on Friday March 27, 2020 @04:03AM
(#22701117)
Which I doubt, given that it depends on what is being compiled into WebAssembly anyway.
It is really nothing new here, just the politics to have a bytecode execution platform that everyone agrees on.
For example, if I can replicate a Flash security flaw with CheerpX, should I blame Flash, CheerpX for being a good implementation, or WebAssembly for allowing Leaning Technologies to faithfully re-implement Flash?
Re:Firefox's low-latency WebAssembly compiler
by afiori on Friday March 27, 2020 @04:40AM
(#22701252)
Memory tagging or inner bound checks have no effect on sandboxing. The wasm guarantee is that a module cannot escape it's sandbox, not that it is logically correct.
the security model of the web site based on executing arbitrary code, so you would need to assume that the wasm you receive tagged it's memory in the most malicious way possible anyway.
the way I see it real hardware needs this kind of checks more because they have worse sandboxing