Fast, Scalable, Secure: WebAssembly and the Future of Isolation

We have reached the limits of traditional hardware based isolation technologies such as  virtual machines, containers, and processes. As a result, developers are increasingly turning to light weight isolation technologies, such as WebAssembly , that can offer startup times, IPC overheads, and resource footprints 10x-1000x lower than traditional hardware based isolation.  This is changing the way we think about serverless edge computing today, and will impact many other areas of the tech stack in the coming years.

In this talk we will explore the isolation technologies that underlie WebAssembly, and the limitations of the current state-of-the-art. I will talk about our work to overcome these limitations on current hardware, and to bring ultralight isolation that is fast, scalable and secure to next generation processors.


Speaker

Tal Garfinkel

Research Scientist @UC San Diego

Tal Garfinkel is a researcher whose work focuses on systems and security. He is the author of 31 papers, and 11 patents, and his work has been recognized with numerous awards, including the 2019 NDSS test-of-time award, for the development of virtual machine introspection, and the 2022 IEEE Cybersecurity Practice Award. Tal received his Ph.D ('10), from Stanford University. And spent nearly a decade with VMware during and after his PhD.

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Date

Wednesday Oct 4 / 03:55PM PDT ( 50 minutes )

Location

Seacliff ABC

Topics

WebAssembly Visualization Serverless Security Architecture

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