JavaScript engines zoo – Compare every JavaScript engine

High budget is no guarantee for absence of critical bugs in an engine, maybe even somewhat opposite - on a big team the incentives are aligned with shipping more features (since nobody gets promoted for maintenance, especially at Google) -> increasing complexity -> increasing bug surface.

If speed is less important and you can live without JIT, that expands your options dramatically and eliminates a large class of bugs. You could take a lightweight engine and compile it to a memory-safe runtime, that'd give you yet another security layer for peace of mind. Several projects did such ports to Wasm/JS/Go - for example your browser likely runs QuickJS to interpret JavaScript inside .pdf (https://github.com/mozilla/pdf.js.quickjs)

workerd does not include any sandboxing layers other than V8 itself. If someone has a V8 zero-day exploit, they can break out of the sandbox.

But putting aside zero-day exploits for a moment, workerd is designed to be a sandbox. That is, applications by default have access to nothing except what you give them. There is only one default-on type of access: public internet access (covering public IPs only). You can disable this by overriding `globalOutbound` in the config (with which you can either intercept internet requests, or just block them).

This is pretty different from e.g. Node, which starts from the assumption that apps should have permission to run arbitrary native code, limited only by the permissions of the user account under which Node is running.

Some other runtimes advertise various forms of permissions, but workerd is the only one I know of where this is the core intended use case, and where all permissions (other than optionally public internet access, as mentioned) must be granted via capability-based security.

Unfortunately, JavaScript engines are complicated, which means they tend to have bugs, and these bugs are often exploitable to escape the sandbox. This is not just true of V8, it's true of all of them; any that claims otherwise is naive. Cloudflare in production has a multi-layer security model to mitigate this, but our model involves a lot of, shall we say, active management which can't easily be packaged up into an open source product.

With all that said, not all threat models require you to worry about such zero-day exploits, and you need to think about risk/benefit tradeoffs. We obviously have to worry about zero-days at Cloudflare since anyone can just upload code to us and run it. But if you're not literally accepting code directly from anonymous internet users then the risk may be a lot lower, and the overall security benefit of fine-grained sandboxing may be worth the increased exposure to zero-days.

The problem I have is that I'm just one person and I don't want to be on call 24/7 ready to react to sandbox escapes, so I'm hoping I can find a solution that someone else built where they are willing to say "this is safe: you can feed in a string of untrusted JavaScript and we are confident it won't break out again".

I think I might be able to get there via WebAssembly (e.g. with QuickJS or MicroQuickJS compiled to WASM) because the whole point of WebAssembly is to solve this one problem.

> But if you're not literally accepting code directly from anonymous internet users then the risk may be a lot lower

That's the problem: this is exactly what I want to be able to do!

I want to build extension systems for my own apps such that users can run their own code or paste in code written by other people and have it execute safely. Similar to Shopify Functions: https://shopify.dev/docs/apps/build/functions

I think the value unlocked by this kind of extension mechanism is ready to skyrocket, because users can use LLMs to help write that code for them.