Authors
Alexandra E Michael, Anitha Gollamudi, Jay Bosamiya, Evan Johnson, Aidan Denlinger, Craig Disselkoen, Conrad Watt, Bryan Parno, Marco Patrignani, Marco Vassena, Deian Stefan
Publication date
2023/1/9
Journal
Proceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages
Volume
7
Issue
POPL
Pages
425-454
Publisher
ACM
Description
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 Wasm almost as easily as they can on native platforms. Memory- Safe WebAssembly (MSWasm) proposes to extend Wasm with language-level memory-safety abstractions to precisely address this problem. In this paper, we build on the original MSWasm position paper to realize this vision. We give a precise and formal semantics of MSWasm, and prove that well-typed MSWasm programs are, by construction, robustly memory safe. To this end, we develop a novel, language-independent memory-safety property based on colored memory locations and pointers. This property also lets us reason about the security guarantees of a formal C-to-MSWasm compiler …
Total citations
Scholar articles
AE Michael, A Gollamudi, J Bosamiya, E Johnson… - Proceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages, 2023