Bytecode Alliance is established by Mozilla, Fastly, Intel and Red Hat
Recently, Mozilla, Fastly, Intel and Red Hat announced the formation of the joint organization Bytecode Alliance, a consortium designed to improve WebAssembly’s ecosystem beyond the browser by collaborating on standards and proposing new standards.
WebAssembly, also known as Wasm, is a binary instruction format designed for stack-based virtual machines. Wasm is a portable target for compiling high-level languages such as C/C++/Rust to deploy client and server applications on the Web. WebAssembly describes a memory-safe sandbox execution environment that can even be implemented inside an existing JavaScript virtual machine. When embedded in the web, WebAssembly enforces browser homology and permission security policies.
Image: Mozilla
Why did the four companies form the Bytecode Alliance? Lin Clark gave a presentation on the Mozilla official website blog. Lin said that current network users are at greater risk, and now everyone is building large-scale modular applications, 80% of which are from package registration centers such as npm, PyPI and crates.io. This approach certainly makes the ecology prosper, but security issues are also increasing rapidly. The people who break these security use the trust of users. When users use the application, they don’t know the software dependencies behind them.
So the Alliance wants to promote the security of this area through WebAssembly technology. The Bytecode Alliance will build the foundation for reliable security, securely using untrusted code, whether in the cloud, on a local desktop, or on small IoT devices. Developers can use open-source code in the same way without risk to the user, and these common reusable base sets can be used separately or embedded in other libraries and applications.
