WebAssembly and Security: a review

TL;DR

This paper provides a comprehensive review of security issues, solutions, and research trends related to WebAssembly, highlighting its potential for both enhancing and compromising system security.

Contribution

It offers the first extensive survey analyzing 121 papers across seven security categories within the WebAssembly ecosystem.

Findings

WebAssembly can improve system security but also pose risks.

Existing research covers vulnerabilities, detection methods, and security mechanisms.

The review identifies gaps and future directions in WebAssembly security research.

Abstract

WebAssembly is revolutionizing the approach to developing modern applications. Although this technology was born to create portable and performant modules in web browsers, currently, its capabilities are extensively exploited in multiple and heterogeneous use-case scenarios. With the extensive effort of the community, new toolkits make the use of this technology more suitable for real-world applications. In this context, it is crucial to study the liaisons between the WebAssembly ecosystem and software security. Indeed, WebAssembly can be a medium for improving the security of a system, but it can also be exploited to evade detection systems or for performing cryptomining activities. In addition, programs developed in low-level languages such as C can be compiled in WebAssembly binaries, and it is interesting to evaluate the security impacts of executing programs vulnerable to attacks against memory in the WebAssembly sandboxed environment. Also, WebAssembly has been designed to provide a secure and isolated environment, but such capabilities should be assessed in order to analyze their weaknesses and propose new mechanisms for addressing them. Although some research works have provided surveys of the most relevant solutions aimed at discovering WebAssembly vulnerabilities or detecting attacks, at the time of writing, there is no comprehensive review of security-related literature in the WebAssembly ecosystem. We aim to fill this gap by proposing a comprehensive review of research works dealing with security in WebAssembly. We analyze 121 papers by identifying seven different security categories. We hope that our work will provide insights into the complex landscape of WebAssembly and guide researchers, developers, and security professionals towards novel avenues in the realm of the WebAssembly ecosystem.