Conference:  Black Hat Asia 2023

Authors: Zong Cao, Zheng Wang, Yeqi Fu, Fangming Gu, Bohan Liu

2023-05-12

WebAssembly (WASM) is a high-performance compiled language for execution in web browsers that interoperates with JavaScript. In general, the wasm compiler in the browser is integrated into the javascript engine, which has proven to be an important attack surface in browsers over the past years. Protecting the security of the WASM compiler is a matter of security for the browser, and thus for the users. We have seen a remote code execution vulnerability in the wasm compiler previously (pwn2own2021), and it seems that no public research has continued to demonstrate vulnerabilities from this attack surface since then. In fact, over the past year, the number of commits of the Webassembly compiler in Webkit has surpassed that of javascript JIT and introduced some new features based on the wasm 2.0 specification such as Exceptions, Tail Call, SIMD, etc. In this case, the security of the wasm compiler should be re-emphasized.In this study, we focus on Webkit vulnerability hunting using fuzz testing. We first investigated some of the existing wasm fuzzer and studied their design patterns, and then we used a clever approach to create an efficient fuzzer for Webkit fuzzing. In addition, we deployed the fuzzer to other architectures because the Codegen part of the WASM compiler is architecture related. So far, we have submitted a total of 13 security-related issues (and the fuzzer is still producing new crashes today), 4 of which have been assigned CVEs and official acknowledgments from Apple, while some are still being investigated. These issues affect LLInt, BBQ, and OMG of the Webassembly compiler, some of which are also architecture related. In this talk, we will explain why we chose Webkit as our primary target and give a detailed introduction to the fuzzer creation process, as well as analyze a few interesting vulnerabilities we found.