Extent of safety properties in WebAssembly

WebAssembly has been one of the trendiest intermediate representations since a while.

However, its definition of safety means preventing breaching the sandbox. Its goal is to prevent escalation from the VM guest code to the VM host boundary.

WASI then defines a capabilities-based syscall interface that can be used by applications. Some alternatives which can be implemented with running native code are through using seccomp on Linux. (or using dkmon on Windows)

In WebAssembly, only one memory segment is allowed. As such, unlike managed language runtimes (such as Java and the CLR), WebAssembly by itself does not provide memory safety.

Each global variable gets its own memory segment however, as do local variables. A memory allocation on the heap means that you lose those thin guarantees…

https://threedots.ovh/blog/2021/01/extent-of-safety-properties-in-webassembly/

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