Multi-Variant Execution at the Edge
This addresses security and performance issues for edge-cloud computing providers and clients by making services harder to attack through moving target techniques.
The paper tackles the problem of improving security and performance in edge-cloud computing by automatically diversifying WebAssembly binaries and randomizing execution paths at runtime, resulting in multivariant binaries that embed hundreds of function variants and exhibit diverse execution traces across a global edge platform.
Edge-cloud computing offloads parts of the computations that traditionally occurs in the cloud to edge nodes,e.g., CDN servers, in order to get closer to the users and reduce latency. To improve performance even further, WebAssembly is increasingly used in this context. Edge-cloud computing providers, such as Fastly or Cloudflare, let their clients deploy stateless services in the form of WebAssembly binaries, which are then translated to machine code and sandboxed for a safe execution at the edge. In this context, we propose a technique that (i) automatically diversifies WebAssembly binaries that are deployed to the edge and (ii) randomizes execution paths at runtime, turning the execution of the services into a moving target. Given a service tobe deployed at the edge, we automatically synthesize functionally equivalent variants for the functions that implement the service.All the variants are then wrapped into a single multivariant WebAssembly binary. When the service endpoint is executed,every time a function is invoked, one of its variants is randomly selected. We implement this technique in the MEWE tool and we validate it with 7 services for cryptography and QR encoding. MEWE generates multivariant binaries that embed hundreds of function variants. We execute the multivariant binaries on the worldwide edge platform provided by Fastly. We show that,at runtime, the multivariant exhibit a remarkable diversity ofexecution traces, across the whole edge platform.