Don't Get Owned by Dependencies: How Firefox Uses Wasm to Protect Itself from Exploitable Libraries
Talkat WasmCon 2023 · on Wednesday, 2023-09-06· at 15:00· Grand Ballroom G, Hyatt Regency Bellevue, 900 Bellevue Way NE·
summary
Firefox runs third party C libraries inside WebAssembly sandboxing using the RLBox framework to contain memory safety bugs, and this architecture ships in production since 2020 and is exercised for 3+ years. RLBox enforces tainted types and compile time checks, auto-inserts dozens–hundreds of marshaling and bounds checks, and leaves 2–4 lines of manual sanitizers per library on average. Tooling evolved from Lucet to wasm2c, supports SIMD, and a SIMD audio sandbox serves about 20 million users.
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chapters (7)
- 0:00Dependency sandboxing with Wasm
- 2:47Memory safety in native libraries
- 7:24Manual Wasm sandboxing challenges
- 12:38RL Box automates sandboxing
- 18:12Firefox performance and deployment
- 23:30Future of Wasm security
- 28:26Summary
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