Related papers: Swivel: Hardening WebAssembly against Spectre
In recent years, stealthy Android malware has increasingly adopted sophisticated techniques to bypass automatic detection mechanisms and harden manual analysis. Adversaries typically rely on obfuscation, anti-repacking, steganography,…
WebAssembly is designed to be an alternative to JavaScript that is a safe, portable, and efficient compilation target for a variety of languages. The performance of high-level languages depends not only on the underlying performance of…
The Spectre vulnerability in modern processors has been widely reported. The key insight in this vulnerability is that speculative execution in processors can be misused to access the secrets. Subsequently, even though the speculatively…
WebAssembly (abbreviated Wasm) has emerged as a cornerstone of web development, offering a compact binary format that allows high-performance applications to run at near-native speeds in web browsers. Despite its advantages, Wasm's binary…
In the quest for efficiency and performance, edge-computing providers eliminate isolation boundaries between tenants, such as strict process isolation, and instead let them compute in a more lightweight multi-threaded single-process design.…
The increasing heterogeneity of hardware and software in the Internet of Things (IoT) poses a major challenge for the portability, maintainability and deployment of software on devices with limited resources. WebAssembly (WASM), originally…
All major web browsers now support WebAssembly, a low-level bytecode intended to serve as a compilation target for code written in languages like C and C++. A key goal of WebAssembly is performance parity with native code; previous work…
WebAssembly is revolutionizing the approach to developing modern applications. Although this technology was born to create portable and performant modules in web browsers, currently, its capabilities are extensively exploited in multiple…
Web client fingerprinting has become a widely used technique for uniquely identifying users, browsers, operating systems, and devices with high accuracy. While it is beneficial for applications such as fraud detection and personalized…
As Internet censors rapidly evolve new blocking techniques, circumvention tools must also adapt and roll out new strategies to remain unblocked. But new strategies can be time consuming for circumventors to develop and deploy, and usually…
Serverless computing at the edge requires lightweight execution environments to minimize cold start latency, especially in Urgent Edge Computing (UEC). This paper compares WebAssembly and unikernel-based MicroVMs for serverless workloads.…
Most programs compiled to WebAssembly (Wasm) today are written in unsafe languages like C and C++. Unfortunately, memory-unsafe C code remains unsafe when compiled to Wasm -- and attackers can exploit buffer overflows and use-after-frees in…
WebAssembly (Wasm) has become a key compilation target for portable and efficient execution across diverse platforms. Benchmarking its performance, however, is a multi-dimensional challenge: it depends not only on the choice of runtime…
Containerization approaches based on namespaces offered by the Linux kernel have seen an increasing popularity in the HPC community both as a means to isolate applications and as a format to package and distribute them. However, their…
New speculation-based attacks that affect large numbers of modern systems are disclosed regularly. Currently, CPU vendors regularly fall back to heavy-handed mitigations like using barriers or enforcing strict programming guidelines…
WebAssembly (WASM) is an immensely versatile and increasingly popular compilation target. It executes applications written in several languages (e.g., C/C++) with near-native performance in various domains (e.g., mobile, edge, cloud).…
WebAssembly's (Wasm) monolithic linear memory model facilitates memory corruption attacks that can escalate to cross-site scripting in browsers or go undetected when a malicious host tampers with a module's state. Existing defenses rely on…
The security of modern JavaScript (JS) engines is critical since they provide the primary defense mechanism for executing untrusted code on the web. The recent integration of WebAssembly (Wasm) has transformed these engines into complex…
Transient execution side-channel attacks, such as Spectre, have been shown to break almost all isolation primitives. We introduce a new security property we call relaxed microarchitectural isolation (RMI) that allows sensitive programs that…
Spectre v1 attacks pose a substantial threat to security-critical software, particularly cryptographic implementations. Existing software mitigations, however, often introduce excessive overhead by indiscriminately hardening instructions…