Microsoft has released Hyperlight Wasm, a Hyperlight virtual machine (VM) "micro-guest" that can run Wasm component workloads written in many programming languages.

Hyperlight is an open-source project announced by the Microsoft Azure Core Upstream team last Fall. Hyperlight is an open-source Rust library that developers can use to execute small, embedded functions using hypervisor-based protection for each function call at scale.

Hyperlight was accepted by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) in February into their Sandbox program. WebAssembly (Wasm) is a low-level intermediate language that can be processed by the JavaScript engine alongside JavaScript. 

Writing on Microsoft's Open Source blog, Yosh Wuyts, Senior Developer Advocate and Lucy Menon, Software engineer and researcher, said that building Hyperlight with a WebAssembly runtime—wasmtime—enables any programming language to execute in a protected Hyperlight micro-VM without any prior knowledge of Hyperlight:

"As far as program authors are concerned, they're just compiling for the wasm32-wasip2 target. This means they can run their programs locally using runtimes like wasmtime or Jco. Or run them on a server using for Nginx Unit, Spin, WasmCloud—or now also Hyperlight Wasm. If done right, developers don't need to think about what runtime their code will run on as they're developing it."

The VM guest isn't limited to use for compiled languages like C, Go, and Rust, but also for interpreted languages like Python, JavaScript, and C#, so long as a language runtime is included as part of the image. For example, for JavaScript, the StarlingMonkey JS Runtime was designed to natively run in WebAssembly.

The blog post continues:

"If we do things right, you will never need to think about whether your application is running inside of a Hyperlight Micro-VM in Azure. You may never know your workload is executing in a Hyperlight Micro VM. "

Wuyts and Menon say that by combining Hyperlight with WebAssembly they're achieving more security and performance than traditional VMs. When traditional virtual machine managers create a new virtual machine, they first need to create new virtual devices, then load a kernel, then load an operating system, and only then are they able to start the application. The lower end of this will take about 125 milliseconds.

"With Hyperlight and Hyperlight Wasm we end up doing far less than traditional VMs. When the Hyperlight VMM creates a new VM, all it needs do to is create a new slice of memory and load the VM guest, which in turn loads the wasm workload. This takes about 1-2 milliseconds today, and work is happening to bring that number to be less than 1 millisecond in the future."

In terms of security, the Hyperlight Wasm guest uses the wasmtime runtime, compiled into a Hyperlight guest as a Rust no_std module. This provides strong isolation boundaries for wasm workloads via a software-defined runtime sandbox, so attackers would need to break through two layers of sandbox. 

The new Hyperlight Wasm VM micro-guest repo is available on GitHub. 

More Information

Hyperlight On GitHub

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