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0 pointslxgr3y ago0 comments

WASM is a "pure" VM/execution environment without any standard system calls or library functions. Given that, you'll need to provide your own seed and your own cryptographically-secure PRNG implementation.

Trust Wallet seems to have botched the latter [1] (in fact, it looks to me like they aren't even understanding the implications of that decision based on the PR description [2]). How is that WASMs fault?

[1] https://github.com/trustwallet/wallet-core/pull/2240

[2] They say that their choice of using the Mersenne Twister is "inspired by emscripten", which does no such thing.

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mrguyorama3y ago

This means that WASM is a garbage tool for this purpose and they should have gone a different route.

lxgrOP3y ago

No, you seem to be misunderstanding what WASM is and isn't. WASM is the specification of a bytecode format (i.e. something like a virtual ISA) and the corresponding execution environment.

It's perfectly possible to implement a secure PRNG in WASM and supply entropy/a seed as a parameter to that, and this is exactly what emscripten does. Trust just happened to provide a non-secure PRNG in their implementation (and ironically quotes emscripten's PR while doing the opposite).

They reimplemented low-level crypto primitives in an insecure way, and quite possibly without even realizing that they were doing so, and their users are paying the price. No language or framework can protect developers from that.