A General Static Binary Rewriting Framework for WebAssembly

TL;DR

This paper introduces BREWasm, the first general static binary rewriting framework for WebAssembly, addressing its structural challenges and enabling efficient, correct, and user-friendly binary modifications.

Contribution

The paper presents BREWasm, a novel framework that overcomes WebAssembly's rewriting challenges, providing a versatile tool for binary modification tasks.

Findings

BREWasm is efficient and correct across diverse WebAssembly applications.

It simplifies binary rewriting tasks, making them more accessible.

Experimental results demonstrate the framework's effectiveness.

Abstract

Binary rewriting is a widely adopted technique in software analysis. WebAssembly (Wasm), as an emerging bytecode format, has attracted great attention from our community. Unfortunately, there is no general-purpose binary rewriting framework for Wasm, and existing effort on Wasm binary modification is error-prone and tedious. In this paper, we present BREWasm, the first general purpose static binary rewriting framework for Wasm, which has addressed inherent challenges of Wasm rewriting including high complicated binary structure, strict static syntax verification, and coupling among sections. We perform extensive evaluation on diverse Wasm applications to show the efficiency, correctness and effectiveness of BREWasm. We further show the promising direction of implementing a diverse set of binary rewriting tasks based on BREWasm in an effortless and user-friendly manner.