Re:Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (February 2026)
by n0n on Monday February 09, 2026 @03:48AM
(#46943103)
Out of curiosity, i am building a WebAssembly VM where every control flow instruction (branches, calls, loops, returns) advances a rolling AES chain state.
Branch targets are encrypted — decryption only works if the chain state is correct, which requires every prior control flow decision to have been correct, all the way back to the run key.
I'm using single round AES instructions which require AES-NI
Wrong key, modified binary, or even a debugger breakpoint causes execution to instantly collapse into garbage.
Its written in Rust and currently passes 261/276 Wasm spec tests (remaining 15 are cross-module imports).
Currently supports SIMD, atomics, exception handling, memory64, tail calls, and WASI with sandboxed file I/O and TCP sockets.
Im tinkering around with porting it to a sel4 backend in adition to the posix backend.
Branch targets are encrypted — decryption only works if the chain state is correct, which requires every prior control flow decision to have been correct, all the way back to the run key.
I'm using single round AES instructions which require AES-NI Wrong key, modified binary, or even a debugger breakpoint causes execution to instantly collapse into garbage. Its written in Rust and currently passes 261/276 Wasm spec tests (remaining 15 are cross-module imports).
Currently supports SIMD, atomics, exception handling, memory64, tail calls, and WASI with sandboxed file I/O and TCP sockets.
Im tinkering around with porting it to a sel4 backend in adition to the posix backend.