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by awesomekling 407 days ago
This is awesome! Really great write-up, and solid work by Jessie :^)

The Ladybird codebase is generally very defensive, but like every browser, our JavaScript engine is slightly less so (in the pursuit of performance.)

There are architectural lessons to learn here beyond just fixing the bugs found. We've since replaced these allocations (+ related ones) with callee-specific stack memory instead of trying to be clever with heap allocation reuse.

We're also migrating more and more of our memory management to garbage collection, which sidesteps a lot of the traditional C++ memory issues.

As others have mentioned, sandboxing & site isolation will make renderer exploitation a lot less powerful than what's demonstrated here. Even so, we obviously want to avoid it as much as possible!

2 comments

This particular memory vulnerability, as I understand it, was a result of a `ReadonlySpan<>` targeting a resizable vector. A simple technique used by the scpptool-enforced safe subset of C++ to address this situation is to temporarily move the contents of the resizable vector into a non-resizable vector [1] and target the span at the non-resizable vector instead.

Upon destruction, the non-resizable vector will automatically return the contents back to the original resizable vector. (It's somewhat analogous to borrowing a slice in Rust.)

While it wouldn't necessarily prevent you from doing the flawed/buggy thing you were trying to do, it would prevent it from resulting in a memory vulnerability.

[1] https://github.com/duneroadrunner/scpptool#xslta_vector-xslt...

Very interesting, I was not familiar with your project. Thanks for sharing it here!
so is this gonna stay in c++ or are you still moving to swift
Whatever happens, large parts of the codebase + dependencies will be C++ (or C) for the foreseeable future.

We're working on integrating with Swift, but despite the team's earnest efforts, Swift/C++ interop is still young and unstable.

On a personal note, I'm increasingly feeling like "C++ with a garbage collector" might actually be a reasonable tool for the task at hand. Watching the development of Fil-C in this space..

What'd be the effect of Swift be on the possibility of a Windows port? I know anything end user friendly is ages away, but I don't live in Apple land, and neither does most of the world. Apple has a monopoly on iOS and huge market share on Mac, and is still at 20% or something.

https://x.com/GregKamradt/status/1848045525473677314

https://x.com/wycats/status/973761496277704704

The core Swift Lang has is being made more independent of Apple, and can be compiled for an increasing number of platforms thanks to the LLVM-based compiler
You can even build swiftUI apps without opening Xcode at all nowadays (albeit no code signing)

which is great.

I never learned swift but I can add features easily now or create 1-day projects using swiftUI that makes great macOS native UI's.

I'm honestly not at all familiar with browsers but I really do wonder if a custom language wouldn't be a reasonable tradeoff. It's not all that insane as that is a path that has been walked before. For instance FoundationDB has their own syntax to manage their actor system which just transpiles to C++: https://github.com/apple/foundationdb/blob/main/flow/README....

V8 also has torque which I think to some degree also fits into that type of mindset.

> I'm honestly not at all familiar with browsers but I really do wonder if a custom language wouldn't be a reasonable tradeoff.

careful, last time someone said that we got Rust

Out of curiosity, why not C# at this point? It's pretty hard to marry C++ with a high-performant garbage collector, since underlying language semantics does not allow for e.g. compacting GCs.
What makes Swift a better choice than C#?

C# is more platform independent. Has a well-tested GC.