@article{discovery10176723, journal = {ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology}, publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery}, title = {Characterizing and Detecting WebAssembly Runtime Bugs}, year = {2023}, note = {This version is the author accepted manuscript. For information on re-use, please refer to the publisher's terms and conditions.}, month = {September}, keywords = {WebAssembly, WebAssembly runtime}, abstract = {WebAssembly (abbreviated WASM) has emerged as a promising language of the Web and also been used for a wide spectrum of software applications such as mobile applications and desktop applications. These applications, named as WASM applications, commonly run in WASM runtimes. Bugs in WASM runtimes are frequently reported by developers and cause the crash of WASM applications. However, these bugs have not been well studied. To fill in the knowledge gap, we present a systematic study to characterize and detect bugs in WASM runtimes. We first harvest a dataset of 311 real-world bugs from hundreds of related posts on GitHub. Based on the collected high-quality bug reports, we distill 31 bug categories of WASM runtimes and summarize their common fix strategies. Furthermore, we develop a pattern-based bug detection framework to automatically detect bugs in WASM runtimes. We apply the detection framework to seven popular WASM runtimes and successfully uncover 60 bugs that have never been reported previously, among which 13 have been confirmed and 9 have been fixed by runtime developers.}, author = {Yixuan, Zhang and Shangtong, Cao and Haoyu, Wang and Chen, Zhenpeng and Xiapu, Luo and Dongliang, Mu and Yun, Ma and Gang, Huang and Xuanzhe, Liu}, url = {https://dl.acm.org/} }