Oron: Towards a Dynamic Analysis Instrumentation Platform for AssemblyScript

Abstract

The dynamic nature of JavaScript may lead to challenges and issues regarding efficiency and security. Analysis tools can help developers tackle some of these issues. In the context of web applications, dynamic analyses are best suited for handling those dynamic features but may affect the programs execution performance. In a first experiment, we attempted to improve the performance of the Aran dynamic analysis platform for JavaScript by utilizing WebAssembly. The extension caused extra performance hits due to context switches between JavaScript and WebAssembly. Because these context switches are inevitable, we decided to refit our work for the analysis of AssemblyScript, a variant of TypeScript which compiles to WebAssembly (and therefore excluding context switches). In this work, we explore this approach in the form of a new source code instrumentation platform named Oron, which allows for the instrumentation of AssemblyScript code. The presented platform is evaluated and shows promising improvements which provide a solid basis for efficient dynamic analysis of AssemblyScript applications.