benefit in Native Client of opening the system to third-party
tool chains.
Native Client applies concepts of software fault isolation
that have been extensively discussed in the research literature.
Our data integrity scheme is a straightforward application of
segmented memory as implemented in the Intel 80386.6 Our
control flow integrity technique builds on the seminal work
by Wahbe, Lucco, Anderson, and Graham,
27 also applying
techniques described by McCamant and Morrisett.
16
Perhaps the most prevalent use of native code in Web
content is via Microsoft’s ActiveX.
7 ActiveX controls
rely on a trust model to provide security, with controls
cryptographically signed using Microsoft’s proprietary
Authenticode system,
17 and only permitted to run once a
user has indicated they trust the publisher. This dependency on the user making prudent trust decisions is
commonly exploited. ActiveX provides no guarantee that
a trusted control is safe. Even when the control itself is
not inherently malicious, defects in the control can be
exploited, often permitting execution of arbitrary code. In
contrast, Native Client is designed to prevent such exploitation, even for flawed NaCl modules.
7. conclusion
This paper has described Native Client, a system for incorporating untrusted x86 native code into an application
that runs in a Web browser. In addition to creating a barrier against undesirable side effects, Native Client enables
modules that are portable both across operating systems
and across Web browsers, and it supports performance-oriented features such as threading and vectorization instructions. We believe the NaCl inner sandbox is extremely
robust; regardless, we provide additional redundant mechanisms to provide defense-in-depth.
In our experience we have found porting existing Linux/
gcc code to Native Client is straightforward, and that the
performance penalty for the sandbox is small, particularly
in the compute-bound scenarios for which the system is
designed.
By describing Native Client here and making it available
as open source, we hope to encourage community scrutiny
and contributions. We believe this feedback together with
our continued diligence will enable us to create a system
that achieves improved safety over previous native code
Web technologies.
Acknowledgments
Many people have contributed to the direction and the
development of Native Client; we acknowledge a few of
them here. The project was conceived based on an idea
from Matt Papakipos. Jeremy Lau, Brad Nelson, John
Grabowski, Kathy Walrath, and Geoff Pike have made valuable contributions to the implementation and evaluation
of the system. Thanks also to Danny Berlin, Chris DiBona,
and Rebecca Ward. Doug Evans is responsible for our
GDB implementation. We thank Sundar Pichai and Henry
Bridge for their role in shaping the project direction. We
would also like to thank Dick Sites for his thoughtful feedback on an earlier version of this paper.
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