WebAssembly Component Model: Enhancing Security, Productivity, and... Bailey Hayes & Kate Goldenring
WebAssembly Component Model: Enhancing Security, Productivity, and Green Computing - Bailey Hayes, Cosmonic & Kate Goldenring, Fermyon Technologies, Inc.
The WebAssembly component model enables linking dependencies of an application together as individual components. This not only isolates dependencies from one another at runtime but also creates a safer, faster, and greener story for handling common vulnerabilities and exposures (CVEs). When CVEs occur for a library, all native and containerized applications that use that library must update it, resolve any shared dependencies, recompile, and rebuild. This takes engineering time and VM churn, as workflows are redeployed. With the component model, only the component with the vulnerability needs to be rebuilt and relinked. All other parts of the application are unchanged, saving time and compute energy. We will illustrate resolving a CVE for an application that is containerized versus one built in WebAssembly using the component model. Attendees will see how security and developer productivity increases and software carbon intensity of applications decreases with Wasm components.