LavaMoat VS wasmer

Just yesterday I watched a talk [0] at WarsawJS about LavaMoat [1], a set of tools to protect against malicious behaviour from npm dependencies. Guess it’s time to look into it deeper.

[0]: https://naugtur.pl/pres3/lava/2023end.html

[1]: https://github.com/LavaMoat/LavaMoat

You are basically talking about Lavamoat. It provides tooling and policies for SES, which aims to make it into standards.

https://github.com/LavaMoat/LavaMoat

Enter: lavamoat. https://github.com/LavaMoat/LavaMoat

You should check out Lavamoat: https://github.com/LavaMoat/LavaMoat

It attempts to do what you're essentially describing. It was built by the MetaMask team, where supply chain attacks are an obviously huge risk.

I've spent some time trying to get it working in an app, but haven't been able to get it all the way working. It's still pretty beta and not well documented.

And it is happening right now. Github is opening the GitHub Advisory Database to community submissions. Awesome community NodeSecure builds cool things like scanner and js-x-ray. There are also lockfile-lint, LavaMoat, Jfrog-npm-tools (and I am sure there is more).

There is a proposal to add OCAPs on a language level in TC39[0]. There is already a drop-in implementation which already works in both Nodejs and browsers[1].

As a developer who wants to sandbox your own (recursive) dependencies, this is made accessible today in Lavamoat[2]. Basically a package or app can provide a policy manifest specifying which capabilities (e.g. network or filesystem access) should be granted for each dependency. Also comes with a tool that will auto-generate a starting point from your existing dependency tree.

IMO this is the future. Currently it does come with a performance penalty but hopefully this idea will catch on and make it into runtime implementations.

Lavamoat is still marked as "preprod" on npm but talking to the author it's a matter of days or weeks until the first stable release.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30703817

[1]: https://github.com/endojs/endo/tree/master/packages/ses

[2]: https://github.com/LavaMoat/LavaMoat

This is awesome. I'd love to have upstream support in Wasmer ( https://wasmer.io )

WebAssembly is extremely portable. WebAssembly runs on: all major web browsers, V8 runtimes like Node.js, and independent Wasm runtimes like Wasmtime, Lucet, and Wasmer.

Unfortunately cosmopolitan wouldn't work for dockerc. Cosmopolitan works as long as you only use it but container runtimes require additional features. Also containers contain arbitrary executables so not sure how that would work either...

As for WASM, this is already possible using container2wasm[0] and wasmer[1]'s ability to generate static binaries.

[0]: https://github.com/ktock/container2wasm

[1]: https://wasmer.io/

I could not find any guide how to add WASM container capability to Docker running on Colima. This guide provides a few Colima templates for exactly this, which adds WasmEdge, Wasmtime and Wasmer runtime types.

Just suggested as well Wasmer on Twitter! https://github.com/wasmerio/wasmer

Looking forward to seeing the results :)

The Biome team has been incredibly fast on solving the challenge and achieving 95% compatibility with Prettier [1]

Just as a note, as it was not mentioned in the article, Wasmer [2] also participated with a $2,500 bounty to compile Biome to WASIX [3], and it has been awesome to see how their team has been working to achieve this as well... hopefully we'll get Biome running in Wasmer soon!

Keep up the great work!!

[1] https://github.com/biomejs/biome/issues/720

[2] https://wasmer.io/

[3] https://wasix.org/

It's funny how WebAssembly can help overcome most of the issues mentioned on the blogpost (packaging, configuration, portability) if addressed properly.

That's the main reason Wasmer [1] was created :)

[1] https://wasmer.io

Thanks for the mention to Wasmer.

I'll put here a link in case is useful for future readers: https://wasmer.io/