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Defending Buffer Overflows in WebAssembly: A Transpiler Approach

Weiqi Feng

Abstract

WebAssembly is quickly becoming a popular compilation target for a variety of code. However, vulnerabilities in the source languages translate to vulnerabilities in the WebAssembly binaries. This work proposes a methodology and a WebAssembly transpiler to prevent buffer overflows in the unmanaged memory of the WebAssembly runtime. The transpiler accepts a WebAssembly binary and adds stack canaries and Address Space Layout Randomization (ASLR) to protect against buffer overflows.

Defending Buffer Overflows in WebAssembly: A Transpiler Approach

Abstract

WebAssembly is quickly becoming a popular compilation target for a variety of code. However, vulnerabilities in the source languages translate to vulnerabilities in the WebAssembly binaries. This work proposes a methodology and a WebAssembly transpiler to prevent buffer overflows in the unmanaged memory of the WebAssembly runtime. The transpiler accepts a WebAssembly binary and adds stack canaries and Address Space Layout Randomization (ASLR) to protect against buffer overflows.

Paper Structure

This paper contains 35 sections, 2 equations, 1 figure, 1 table.

Table of Contents

  1. Introduction
  2. Background of WebAssembly
  3. Overview
  4. Managed and Unmanaged Data
  5. Indirect table
  6. WebAssembly Compiler
  7. Threat model and Design Options
  8. Threat model
  9. Design Options
  10. Implementation
  11. Overview
  12. Random Value Generation
  13. ASLR
  14. Implementation Details
  15. Stack Canary
  16. ...and 20 more sections

Figures (1)

  • Figure 1: Example of WebAssembly program in wat format