As the burgeoning WebAssembly ecosystem continues to gain momentum, Fastly increases its open source contributions to the secure-by-default tool of choice for developers.
Fastly, Inc., a global edge cloud platform provider, has expanded its investments in the WebAssembly ecosystem, reinforcing its belief that this emerging technology unlocks a more performant, secure, and flexible future for delivering websites and applications. In pursuit of this collaborative mission, Fastly has joined the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and will participate in the WebAssembly Working Group, and continues its contributions to the newly-incorporated Bytecode Alliance, a nonprofit dedicated to creating a new, more secure software ecosystem. Led by Fastly’s WebAssembly team, the evolution of Cranelift’s secure sandboxing is one example of the Bytecode Alliance’s commitment to fostering more secure software development.
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WebAssembly’s secure-by-design future fuels growing popularity
Today’s predominant supply chain models for building software come with inherent weaknesses, which have played significant roles in helping attackers breach critical infrastructure and gain access to billions of people’s personal information. The ecosystem the Bytecode Alliance aims to build, leveraging WebAssembly and other standards and community efforts, will resolve potentially dangerous shortcomings in execution semantics and sandboxed environments within the software supply chain, addressing development gaps in trust and data integrity. This secure-by-default trait has made WebAssembly’s encompassing infrastructure and other emerging standards, such as the WebAssembly System Interface (WASI), progressively popular with organizations and developers that need to deliver safe, performant software across platforms and devices, and to protect against increasingly detrimental system and supply chain vulnerabilities.
“Fastly believes it’s absolutely vital to give developers access to technology that makes it easy and safe to build applications in the languages they are familiar with, using the tools they are comfortable using, and then running that code on the Fastly edge and other environments where performance and security are non-negotiable,” said Tyler McMullen, CTO of Fastly. “Our work with the Bytecode Alliance and W3C further validates our commitment to industry collaboration that makes more secure, performant edge computing and software development an industry-wide reality.”
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Fastly spearheads evolution of critical sandboxing and runtime technology
Investment in open source and cross-industry collaboration is vital to improving the security and performance of the internet for everyone. Alongside Bytecode Alliance members, Fastly’s WebAssembly team has specifically prioritized contributing to Wasmtime, a WebAssembly runtime, and Cranelift, an open-source, next-generation code generator for use in WebAssembly to provide sandbox security functionality. Cranelift’s advanced security controls — separately verified by rigorous Fastly, Mozilla, and Bytecode Alliance assessments — are crucial to the speedy yet secure-by-design technology that underlies Fastly’s serverless compute solution Compute@Edge, and is uniquely suited to help power a more secure ecosystem for all who work with, collaborate on, and contribute to WebAssembly.
Fastly and its Bytecode Alliance partners are committed to WebAssembly as a mission-critical technology that enables an interoperable software community, where organizations rally around shared foundations. To learn more about the Bytecode Alliance and its collaborations, visit its website and blog.
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