Quentin Michaud | Searcharxiv

arXiv2025

Abstraction of Trusted Execution Environments as the Missing Layer for Broad Confidential Computing Adoption: A Systematization of Knowledge

Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs) protect sensitive code and data from the operating system, hypervisor, or other untrusted software. Different solutions exist, each proposing different features. Abstraction layers aim to unify the ecosystem, allowing application developers and system administrators to leverage confidential computing as broadly and efficiently as possible. We start with an overview of representative available TEE technologies. We describe and summarize each TEE ecosystem, classifying them in different categories depending on their main design choices. Then, we propose a systematization of knowledge focusing on different abstraction layers around each design choice. We describe the underlying technologies of each design, as well as the inner workings and features of each abstraction layer. Our study reveals opportunities for improving existing abstraction layer solutions. It also highlights WebAssembly, a promising approach that supports the largest set of features. We close with a discussion on future directions for research, such as how future abstraction layers may evolve and integrate with the confidential computing ecosystem.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2024

Securing Stack Smashing Protection in WebAssembly Applications

WebAssembly is an instruction set architecture and binary format standard, designed for secure execution by an interpreter. Previous work has shown that WebAssembly is vulnerable to buffer overflow due to the lack of effective protection mechanisms. In this paper, we evaluate the implementation of Stack Smashing Protection (SSP) in WebAssembly standalone runtimes, and uncover two weaknesses in their current implementation. The first one is the possibility to overwrite the SSP reference value because of the contiguous memory zones inside a WebAssembly process. The second comes from the reliance of WebAssembly on the runtime to provide randomness in order to initialize the SSP reference value, which impacts the robustness of the solution. We address these two flaws by hardening the SSP implementation in terms of storage and random generator failure, in a way that is generalizable to all of WebAssembly. We evaluate our new, more robust, solution to prove that the implemented improvements do not reduce the efficiency of SSP.

cs.CR↗