Wemby’s Web: Hunting for Memory Corruption in WebAssembly

WebAssembly enables fast execution of performance-critical in web applications utilizing native code. However, recent research has demonstrated the potential for memory corruption errors within WebAssembly modules to exploit web applications. In this work, we present the first systematic analysis of memory corruption in WebAssembly, unveiling the prevalence of a novel threat model where memory corruption enables code injection on a victim’s browser. Our large-scale analysis across 37797 domains reveals that an alarming 29411 (77.81%) of those fully trust data coming from potentially attacker-controlled sources. As a result, an attacker can exploit memory errors to manipulate the WebAssembly memory, where the data is implicitly trusted and frequently passed into security-sensitive functions such as eval or directly into the DOM via innerHTML. Thus, an attacker can abuse this trust to gain JavaScript code execution, i.e., Cross-Site Scripting (XSS). To tackle this issue, we present Wemby, the first viable approach to efficiently analyze WebAssembly-powered websites holistically. We demonstrate that Wemby is proficient at detecting remotely exposed memory corruption errors in web applications through fuzzing. For this purpose, we implement binary-only WebAssembly instrumentation that provides fine-grained memory corruption oracles. We applied Wemby to different websites, uncovering several memory corruption bugs, including one on the Zoom platform. In terms of performance, our ablation study demonstrates that Wemby outperforms current WebAssembly fuzzers. Specifically, Wemby achieves an average speed improvement of 232 times and delivers 46% greater code coverage compared to the state-of-the-art.