Comment by stevemk14ebr | Hacker News Reader

Comment by stevemk14ebr | Hacker News Reader

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I can't speak to the original intent for severely limiting the language dtrace uses (no loops, user defined functions, etc). However, I can say that web assembly itself is designed to be sandboxed so I wouldn't say that is too dangerous at all. It would be quite nice if Microsoft explored a web assembly kernel engine. You see designs like this with ebpf already, they all are trying to do the same - create a statically verifiable language and isolate it's execution. I'd argue using something like web assembly is much better than designing a new language like dtrace does honestly. It's good enough for browsers to run untrusted code, kernel is not terribly different. My WASM kernel driver is however just a POC to vet the idea.

For dlls in the kernel, yes absolutely insecure. It's intended to be a tool run in an analysis VM not on endpoint user systems. The security model is simply different for the DLL based architecture. One of the big reasons I am ok with this design is because driver signature enforcement already must be manually disabled to load the C driver that uses DLLs like this. With DSE off you can already easily load unsigned kernel code so this doesn't open any additional security holes.

it's a dtrace reimplementation because it's using those kernel interfaces. The architecture of the scripting system on top of that could be anything. The wasm rust system mirrors MS' architecture, the C++ DLL system differs intentionally from it.

“No loops” was done for safety reasons. https://www.cs.princeton.edu/courses/archive/fall05/cos518/p..., section 3.5:

“To prevent DIF from inducing an infinite loop in probe context, only forward branches are permitted. This safety provision may seem draconian — it eliminates loops altogether — but in practice we have not discovered it to present a serious limitation”

And we disagree about what can be called “a dtrace reimplementation”. Because there’s decades of prior art on tracing, I wouldn’t call anything that allows looping that.

From their quote it does represent a big limitation unfortunately. No loops limits the ability to do relatively simple string manipulations and iterate over other object collections where the size isn't statically known. The best you can do is basically manually unroll loops up to a fixed size. For windows dtrace for example it prevents you from writing your own wide to narrow strong routine, as well as doing sub string matches. Also, enumerating bit enums and converting flags to strings. There's many more cases too of course. I can understand the design limitation to some extent. But using the same kernel tracing APIs then extending it with a more powerful, arguably potentially less secure language, was a primary motivator for why I did this research at all. Ebpf for example allows loops. I disagree with you that a reimplementation must follow the complete architecture of the system being reimplemented, that's quite a strict interpretation in my opinion. You're of course entitled to that, I hope it's interesting/useful regardless of terminology :)

Safety is very much a constraint in DTrace; more information on this constraint and its ramifications can be found in [0].

[0] http://dtrace.org/blogs/bmc/2005/07/19/dtrace-safety/

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