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Modular Abstract Definitional Interpreters for WebAssembly

Authors Katharina Brandl, Sebastian Erdweg, Sven Keidel, Nils Hansen

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Author Details

Katharina Brandl
  • Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz, Germany
Sebastian Erdweg
  • Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz, Germany
Sven Keidel
  • TU Darmstadt, Germany
Nils Hansen
  • Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz, Germany

Funding

The German Research Foundation (DFG)-451545561, and ATHENE: National Research Center for Applied Cybersecurity, SeDiTraH

Acknowledgements

We thank the anonymous reviewers for their effort and helpful suggestions.

Cite As Get BibTex

Katharina Brandl, Sebastian Erdweg, Sven Keidel, and Nils Hansen. Modular Abstract Definitional Interpreters for WebAssembly. In 37th European Conference on Object-Oriented Programming (ECOOP 2023). Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs), Volume 263, pp. 5:1-5:28, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2023) https://doi.org/10.4230/LIPIcs.ECOOP.2023.5

Abstract

Even though static analyses can improve performance and secure programs against vulnerabilities, no static whole-program analyses exist for WebAssembly (Wasm) to date. Part of the reason is that Wasm has many complex language concerns, and it is not obvious how to adopt existing analysis frameworks for these features. This paper explores how abstract definitional interpretation can be used to develop sophisticated analyses for Wasm and other complex languages efficiently. In particular, we show that the semantics of Wasm can be decomposed into 19 language-independent components that abstract different aspects of Wasm. We have written a highly configurable definitional interpreter for full Wasm 1.0 in 1628 LOC against these components. Analysis developers can instantiate this interpreter with different value and effect abstractions to obtain abstract definitional interpreters that compute inter-procedural control and data-flow information. This way, we develop the first whole-program dead code, constant propagation, and taint analyses for Wasm, each in less than 210 LOC. We evaluate our analyses on 1458 Wasm binaries collected by others in the wild. Our implementation is based on a novel framework for definitional abstract interpretation in Scala that eliminates scalability issues of prior work.

Subject Classification

ACM Subject Classification
  • Software and its engineering → Automated static analysis
Keywords
  • Static Analysis
  • WebAssembly

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