Sandboxing Your Sandbox: Leveraging Hypervisors for WebAssembly Security
Talkat WasmCon 2023 · on Thursday, 2023-09-07· at 16:15· Grand Ballroom I, Hyatt Regency Bellevue, 900 Bellevue Way NE·
summary
Shows that WebAssembly bugs and hostile modules still leak: a libpng 8.8 stack-to-heap overflow turns image conversion into a reflected XSS, and a Wasmtime allocator layout yields a 9.9 inter-module memory read. Proposes layered defense using Hyperlite micro VMs plus Rust for memory safety, with hypervisor features like snapshot and rollback, resource capping and deep isolation. Demonstrates 2,000 micro VMs launched in under two seconds, ~300 MB each, and ~250 µs average call latency (50k calls) — a workable, higher-assurance deployment model.
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chapters (9)
- 0:00Introduction
- 1:44Why security expertise isn't required
- 3:29WebAssembly isolation limits
- 4:58Agenda and basics
- 8:10Libpng vulnerability
- 15:29Host security risks
- 19:23Improving WebAssembly security
- 22:08Hyperlite and Hyper-V case
- 27:05Recap and Q&A session
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