That’s a Tough Call: Studying the Challenges of Call Graph Construction for WebAssemblyACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Artifact
WebAssembly is a low-level bytecode format that powers applications and libraries running in browsers, on the server side, and in standalone runtimes. Call graphs are at the core of many interprocedural static analysis and optimization techniques. However, WebAssembly poses some unique challenges for static call graph construction. Currently, these challenges are neither well understood, nor is it clear to what extent existing techniques address them. This paper presents the first systematic study of WebAssembly-specific challenges for static call graph construction and of the state-of-the-art in call graph analysis. We identify and classify 12 challenges, encode them into a suite of 24 executable microbenchmarks, and measure their prevalence in real-world binaries. These challenges reflect idiosyncrasies of WebAssembly, such as indirect calls via a mutable function table, interactions with the host environment, and unmanaged linear memory. We show that they commonly occur across a set of more than 8,000 real-world binaries. Based on our microbenchmarks and a set of executable real-world binaries, we then study the soundness and precision of four existing static analyses. Our findings include that, surprisingly, all of the existing techniques are unsound, without this being documented anywhere. We envision our work to provide guidance for improving static call graph construction for WebAssembly. In particular, the presented microbenchmarks will enable future work to check whether an analysis supports challenging language features, and to quantify its soundness and precision.
Tue 18 JulDisplayed time zone: Pacific Time (US & Canada) change
13:30 - 15:00 | ISSTA 4: Static AnalysisTechnical Papers at Smith Classroom (Gates G10) Chair(s): Christian Hammer University of Passau | ||
13:30 15mTalk | Detecting Vulnerabilities in Linux-Based Embedded Firmware with SSE-Based On-Demand Alias Analysis Technical Papers Kai Cheng Shenzhen Institute of Advanced Technology at Chinese Academy of Sciences; Sangfor Technologies, Yaowen Zheng Nanyang Technological University, Tao Liu Pennsylvania State University, Le Guan University of Georgia, Peng Liu Pennsylvania State University, Hong Li Institute of Information Engineering at Chinese Academy of Sciences, Hongsong Zhu Institute of Information Engineering at Chinese Academy of Sciences; University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Kejiang Ye Shenzhen Institute of Advanced Technology at Chinese Academy of Sciences, Limin Sun Institute of Information Engineering at Chinese Academy of Sciences; University of Chinese Academy of Sciences DOI | ||
13:45 15mTalk | Beware of the Unexpected: Bimodal Taint AnalysisACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Technical Papers DOI | ||
14:00 15mTalk | OCFI: Make Function Entry Identification Hard Again Technical Papers Chengbin Pang Nanjing University, Tiantai Zhang Nanjing University, Xuelan Xu Nanjing University, Linzhang Wang Nanjing University, Bing Mao Nanjing University DOI | ||
14:15 15mTalk | Tai-e: A Developer-Friendly Static Analysis Framework for Java by Harnessing the Good Designs of Classics Technical Papers DOI Pre-print | ||
14:30 15mTalk | That’s a Tough Call: Studying the Challenges of Call Graph Construction for WebAssemblyACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Artifact Technical Papers Daniel Lehmann University of Stuttgart, Michelle Thalakottur Northeastern University, Frank Tip Northeastern University, Michael Pradel University of Stuttgart DOI | ||
14:45 15mTalk | Eunomia: Enabling User-Specified Fine-Grained Search in Symbolically Executing WebAssembly BinariesACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Technical Papers Ningyu He Peking University, Zhehao Zhao Peking University, Jikai Wang Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Yubin Hu Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, Shengjian (Daniel) Guo Baidu Security, Haoyu Wang Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Guangtai Liang Huawei Cloud Computing Technologies, Ding Li Peking University, Xiangqun Chen Peking University, Yao Guo Peking University DOI |