research-article

Characterizing and Detecting WebAssembly Runtime Bugs

Authors:

Xuanzhe LiuAuthors Info & Claims

ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology, Volume 33, Issue 2

Article No.: 37, Pages 1 - 29

https://doi.org/10.1145/3624743

Published: 21 December 2023 Publication History

Abstract

WebAssembly (abbreviated WASM) has emerged as a promising language of the Web and also been used for a wide spectrum of software applications such as mobile applications and desktop applications. These applications, named WASM applications, commonly run in WASM runtimes. Bugs in WASM runtimes are frequently reported by developers and cause the crash of WASM applications. However, these bugs have not been well studied. To fill in the knowledge gap, we present a systematic study to characterize and detect bugs in WASM runtimes. We first harvest a dataset of 311 real-world bugs from hundreds of related posts on GitHub. Based on the collected high-quality bug reports, we distill 31 bug categories of WASM runtimes and summarize their common fix strategies. Furthermore, we develop a pattern-based bug detection framework to automatically detect bugs in WASM runtimes. We apply the detection framework to seven popular WASM runtimes and successfully uncover 60 bugs that have never been reported previously, among which 13 have been confirmed and 9 have been fixed by runtime developers.

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Cited By

Ray P(2023)An Overview of WebAssembly for IoT: Background, Tools, State-of-the-Art, Challenges, and Future DirectionsFuture Internet10.3390/fi1508027515:8(275)Online publication date: 18-Aug-2023
https://doi.org/10.3390/fi15080275
Subramanyan BHollum AMazzeo GFicke MVaydia D(2023)Enabling Trusted TEE-as-a-Service Models with Privacy Preserving Automatons2023 IEEE International Conference on Cloud Computing Technology and Science (CloudCom)10.1109/CloudCom59040.2023.00048(252-260)Online publication date: 4-Dec-2023
https://doi.org/10.1109/CloudCom59040.2023.00048
Zheng WHua B(2023)A Comprehensive Study of Bugs in Embedded WebAssembly Virtual Machines2023 3rd International Conference on Computer Science, Electronic Information Engineering and Intelligent Control Technology (CEI)10.1109/CEI60616.2023.10528174(901-907)Online publication date: 15-Dec-2023
https://doi.org/10.1109/CEI60616.2023.10528174
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Index Terms

Characterizing and Detecting WebAssembly Runtime Bugs
1. General and reference
  1. Cross-computing tools and techniques
    1. Empirical studies
2. Software and its engineering
  1. Software creation and management

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Published In

cover image ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology

ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology Volume 33, Issue 2

February 2024

947 pages

EISSN:1557-7392

DOI:10.1145/3618077

Editor:
Mauro Pezzè
USI Universitá della Svizzera italiana and SIT Schaffhausen Institute of Technology, Switzerland

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Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

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New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 21 December 2023

Online AM: 20 September 2023

Accepted: 16 August 2023

Revised: 07 August 2023

Received: 20 January 2023

Published in TOSEM Volume 33, Issue 2

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Funding Sources

National Key R&D Program of China
National Natural Science Foundation of China
Beijing Outstanding Young Scientist Program
Center for Data Space Technology and System, Peking University
ERC Advanced Grant
Hong Kong RGC Project

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Cited By

Ray P(2023)An Overview of WebAssembly for IoT: Background, Tools, State-of-the-Art, Challenges, and Future DirectionsFuture Internet10.3390/fi1508027515:8(275)Online publication date: 18-Aug-2023
https://doi.org/10.3390/fi15080275
Subramanyan BHollum AMazzeo GFicke MVaydia D(2023)Enabling Trusted TEE-as-a-Service Models with Privacy Preserving Automatons2023 IEEE International Conference on Cloud Computing Technology and Science (CloudCom)10.1109/CloudCom59040.2023.00048(252-260)Online publication date: 4-Dec-2023
https://doi.org/10.1109/CloudCom59040.2023.00048
Zheng WHua B(2023)A Comprehensive Study of Bugs in Embedded WebAssembly Virtual Machines2023 3rd International Conference on Computer Science, Electronic Information Engineering and Intelligent Control Technology (CEI)10.1109/CEI60616.2023.10528174(901-907)Online publication date: 15-Dec-2023
https://doi.org/10.1109/CEI60616.2023.10528174
Zhou SJiang MChen WZhou HWang HLuo X(2023)WADIFF: A Differential Testing Framework for WebAssembly Runtimes2023 38th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering (ASE)10.1109/ASE56229.2023.00188(939-950)Online publication date: 11-Sep-2023
https://doi.org/10.1109/ASE56229.2023.00188

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