Wasm Research Day 2025
Carnegie Mellon University’s WebAssembly Research Center (WRC) hosts the WebAssembly (Wasm) Research Days, gathering a diverse group of researchers from academia, industry, and the W3C Community Group responsible for WebAssembly standards. WRC’s partners, such as Woven by Toyota, Shopify, Siemens, and DFINITY, along with representatives from major tech firms like Google, Mozilla, Apple, and others, participate in the event to foster collaboration across various sectors and explore current and future applications of WebAssembly. The Research Days provide a platform for in-depth discussions, sharing insights, and integrating theoretical research with practical applications, thereby enhancing the understanding and impact of WebAssembly in the technology landscape.
At Wasm 2025, held on February 11, Markus Scherer presented “Wappler and Beyond: Reachability and Noninterference Analysis for WebAssembly,” joint work with Jeppe Fredsgaard Blaabjerg (Aarhus University, Denmark), Alexander Sjösten, Magdalena Solitro, Matteo Maffei (TU Wien).
The presentation explored the ongoing research on the static analysis of WebAssembly by the research group, highlighting Wappler as the first sound and automated technique in this domain. Wappler’s core method involves encoding WebAssembly’s semantics into Horn clauses, making it compatible with automated theorem provers like z3. The discussion then advanced to current research efforts that extend Wappler’s capabilities to noninterference analysis. This hyperproperty, crucial for security, aids in evaluating potential threats, particularly how an attacker might compromise system integrity and confidentiality. Given WebAssembly’s critical role as a conduit linking various system components, understanding this aspect is particularly significant.
Video
Wappler: Sound Reachability Analysis for WebAssembly
Previuos Talk