SeeWasm: An Efficient and Fully-Functional Symbolic Execution Engine for WebAssembly Binaries
Year: 2024
Type: preprint
Abstract: WebAssembly (Wasm), as a compact, fast, and isolation-guaranteed binary format, can be compiled from more than 40 high-level programming languages. However, vulnerabilities in Wasm binaries could lead to sensitive data leakage and even threaten their hosting environments. To identify them, symbolic execution is widely adopted due to its soundness and the ability to automatically generate exploitations. However, existing symbolic executors for Wasm binaries are typically platform-specific, which means that they cannot support all Wasm features. They may also require significant manual interventions to complete the analysis and suffer from efficiency issues as well. In this paper, we propose an efficient and fully-functional symbolic execution engine, named SeeWasm. Compared with existing tools, we demonstrate that SeeWasm supports full-featured Wasm binaries without further manual intervention, while accelerating the analysis by 2 to 6 times. SeeWasm has been adopted by existing works to identify more than 30 0-day vulnerabilities or security issues in well-known C, Go, and SGX applications after compiling them to Wasm binaries.
Source: arXiv (Cornell University)
Authors: He, Ningyu, Zhao, Zhehao, Guan, Hanqin, Wang, Jikai, Peng, Shuo, Li, Ding, Wang, Haoyu, Chen, Xiangqun, Guo, Yao
Language: English
Subfield: Software
Field: Computer Science
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: green
Award: G2916954678
OpenAlex ID: W4402500921