POSTER: Leveraging eBPF to enhance sandboxing of WebAssembly runtimes

Abstract

WebAssembly is a binary instruction format designed as a portable compilation target enabling the deployment of untrusted code in a safe and efficient manner. While it was originally designed to be run inside web browsers, modern runtimes like Wasmtime and WasmEdge can execute WebAssembly directly on various systems. In order to access system resources with a universal hostcall interface, a standardization effort named WebAssembly System Interface (WASI) is currently undergoing. With specific regard to the file system, runtimes must prevent hostcalls to access arbitrary locations, thus they introduce security checks to only permit access to a pre-defined list of directories. This approach not only suffers from poor granularity, it is also error-prone and has led to several security issues. In this work we replace the security checks in hostcall wrappers with eBPF programs, enabling the introduction of fine-grained per-module policies. Preliminary experiments confirm that our approach introduces limited overhead to existing runtimes.