6 ms·

The last thing we need in hindsight to Meltdown and Spectre is running untrusted binaries in the browser aka WebAssembly. Btw deactivating WebAssembly support

by frik 9y ago

The last thing we need in hindsight to Meltdown and Spectre is running untrusted binaries in the browser aka WebAssembly. Btw deactivating WebAssembly support in Chrome 63 (up-to-date) doesn't work anymore!! chrome://flags/#enable-webassembly Setting it to "deactivated" does nothing, WebAssembly is still active.

pjmlp 9y ago
I keep saying that WebAssembly is the revenge of Flash, Applets, Silverlight, ActiveX,... Just wait until it gets a bit more mature. It will be the same fun as when Ads moved away from Flash into HTML 5/JavaScript.
- tracker1 9y ago
  Well, in general the problem with flash was the plugin wasn't well isolated, and often would crash the browser, and before NT-based windows was common the entire OS pretty readily (presumes windows). Not to mention the security track record. Browser isolation, and how well it will likely be with wasm is quite a bit different. That said, it will lead to more closed commercial sites, but the JS outputted from webpack+babel+uglify is already unbelievably difficult to wade through without source maps. It's not significantly different imho.
abiox 9y ago
> untrusted binaries afaik, wasm is not 'binaries' in that it's not an arbitrary blob of machine code fed right into the cpu. it's still running in a sandbox (a la javascript) including similar limitations wrt CORS etc.
- sitkack 9y ago
  And a sandbox so powerful that all the browser vendors just turned off SharedArrayBuffer. https://www.chromium.org/Home/chromium-security/ssca https://www.chromium.org/Home/chromium-security/ssca https://blog.mozilla.org/security/2018/01/03/mitigations-landing-new-class-timing-attack/ https://blog.mozilla.org/security/2018/01/03/mitigations-lan... WASM is portable binaries.
  - abiox 9y ago
    well, i guess in the same way that javascript or anything else is, when there are sandbox escapes. bugs are a thing.
- austincheney 9y ago
  > it's still running in a sandbox (a la javascript) People frequently make this comparison upon hearing the term sandbox, but this is a weak comparison. Yes JavaScript executes in a sandbox, but the JavaScript (JIT) sandbox is purely for performance instead of isolation, which is like comparing a pencil sharpener to a bulldozer just because they are both portable machines. A better comparison of the JavaScript (JIT) sandbox is the JVM.

by frik 9y ago

pjmlp 9y ago

I keep saying that WebAssembly is the revenge of Flash, Applets, Silverlight, ActiveX,... Just wait until it gets a bit more mature. It will be the same fun as when Ads moved away from Flash into HTML 5/JavaScript.

tracker1 9y ago
Well, in general the problem with flash was the plugin wasn't well isolated, and often would crash the browser, and before NT-based windows was common the entire OS pretty readily (presumes windows). Not to mention the security track record. Browser isolation, and how well it will likely be with wasm is quite a bit different. That said, it will lead to more closed commercial sites, but the JS outputted from webpack+babel+uglify is already unbelievably difficult to wade through without source maps. It's not significantly different imho.

abiox 9y ago

> untrusted binaries afaik, wasm is not 'binaries' in that it's not an arbitrary blob of machine code fed right into the cpu. it's still running in a sandbox (a la javascript) including similar limitations wrt CORS etc.

sitkack 9y ago
And a sandbox so powerful that all the browser vendors just turned off SharedArrayBuffer. https://www.chromium.org/Home/chromium-security/ssca https://www.chromium.org/Home/chromium-security/ssca https://blog.mozilla.org/security/2018/01/03/mitigations-landing-new-class-timing-attack/ https://blog.mozilla.org/security/2018/01/03/mitigations-lan... WASM is portable binaries.
- abiox 9y ago
  well, i guess in the same way that javascript or anything else is, when there are sandbox escapes. bugs are a thing.
austincheney 9y ago
> it's still running in a sandbox (a la javascript) People frequently make this comparison upon hearing the term sandbox, but this is a weak comparison. Yes JavaScript executes in a sandbox, but the JavaScript (JIT) sandbox is purely for performance instead of isolation, which is like comparing a pencil sharpener to a bulldozer just because they are both portable machines. A better comparison of the JavaScript (JIT) sandbox is the JVM.