How Shopify Uses WebAssembly Outside of the Browser

Re:How Shopify Uses WebAssembly Outside of the Browser by xg15 on Saturday December 19, 2020 @06:58AM (#25476880)

I think WASM has the added benefit of being platform-independent - which is generally a good thing but can even be a security feature: With native code, even if run without privileges, you need to expose a lot of details about your hardware that malicious users could use to find vulnerabilities.

With WASM, the host can keep the actual hardware architecture and even the actual machine code that is generated a secret.

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Re:How Shopify Uses WebAssembly Outside of the Browser by CyberRabbi on Saturday December 19, 2020 @07:04AM (#25476908)

Yeah but there’s a nearly 100% chance your server platform is x86 and in the case that it changes, it will be a gradual change in the long term.

While it’s nice to have the platform independence, it has nearly zero practical utility here.

If you’re making a security argument, using seccomp over a complex webassembly runtime reduces your attack surface.

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Re:How Shopify Uses WebAssembly Outside of the Browser by croes on Saturday December 19, 2020 @07:10AM (#25476929)

Security by obscurity?

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