WebAssembly

WebAssembly is a nice case study of how to achieve isolation without relying on an operating system, virtual machine monitor, etc. For this lecture, you have two reading assignments:

• First, read sections 1-2 of the original WebAssembly paper, published in 2017, to understand the motivation behind its design and the overall approach taken by WebAssembly.
• Second, read the Provably-Safe Sandboxing paper, published in 2022, to understand the challenges involved in implementing a secure WebAssembly runtime, and some ideas for how to improve confidence in the security of a WebAssembly runtime implementation.