[zzzcpan]

Trusted code has to be free from vulnerabilities to be immune, so it's still an issue even for trusted code. And I'm pretty sure neither webassembly nor other sandboxing methods can fully mitigate speculative attacks on out-of-order CPUs within the same address space, you'd need a programming language with a compiler designed from scratch for it.

[zaarn]

Well, it doesn't have to be free from vulnerabilities, not any more than any other OS code. The sandboxed code that is running trusted (ie without trampolines and spectre-defenses) would still hold the guarantees given by the sandbox (WASM), which are pretty much on par with what a modern browser can do for JS and WASM. And keep in mind that both WASM and JS now have spectre-defenses, so there is no need for a PL from scratch for this.

[zzzcpan]

> And keep in mind that both WASM and JS now have spectre-defenses, so there is no need for a PL from scratch for this.

As far as I remember they weren't able to defend from side channel attacks within the same process completely and decided to rely on process isolation instead, estimating it would be too much work to address all known spectre class vulnerabilities on their existing compilers and too hard to ensure for defenses not to be broken later by compiler developers.