Microsoft has announced that he was working on the hyperlight wasm. The project can already be seen on Github, but still a experimental situation. This means that the webassembly (WASM) module can be performed within hyperlight micro-VM (virtual machine), which should bring both high performance and security.
Hyperlite was developed by Microsoft Azure Core Upstream and presented in November 2024. This is a source-open-rust library which Microsoft has now been a sandbox project Cloud handed over by Cloud Domestic Computing Foundation (CNCF)It works to create a micro virtual machine and is a safe manner to complete the reliable code – with low delay and minimal overhead. These micro-VMs work without a kernel or operating system, but use guests made using hyperlight guest library for hyperlight. Guests are programs that combine a particular curnell with an application runtime at an event. More statements on this Announcement can be found in contribution,
Construction on hyperlight, Microsoft is now working on the development of hyperlight wasm, a corrosion-population rate. Hyperlight wasm should enable WASM component workload as hyperlight guests in many programming languages.
Hyperlight wasm target: compatibility, speed and safety
As the development team states, the disadvantage of the traditional VM is that compatibility in favor of performance can be banned. Compatibility difficulties can affect both operating systems and system interfaces layer or programming language and library.
This is the place where the webass ansembal approach comes. As Microsoft states, Webassembly System Interface (WASI) and Webassembly models are possible with a mild performance environment, in which programs can run which were written in almost every programming language. The hyperlight wasm takes advantage of the implementation of a small set at a high level, providing a wide range of abstraction and compatibility performing in an almost arbitrary execution environment.
Apart from performance, hyperlight wasm security should also benefit. The hyperlight uses wasmtime runtime, which is compiled as a rust-no_std module in the hyperlight guest. Wasmtime should stand out due to strict insulation range for wasm-wounds due to software-defined runtime sandbox. Therefore potential attackers must cross two security layers: wasm sandbox and virtual machine.
Hyperlight wasm Available on githubFurther background information and future plans for hyperlight wasm Microsoft communicates in its open source blog,
(May)
