WebAssembly Based Portable and Secure Sensor Interface for Internet of Things

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Ou, Botong, Yang, Baijian
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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author Ou, Botong
Yang, Baijian
author_facet Ou, Botong
Yang, Baijian
contents As the expansion of IoT connectivity continues to provide quality-of-life improvements around the world, they simultaneously introduce increasing privacy and security concerns. The lack of a clear definition in managing shared and protected access to IoT sensors offer channels by which devices can be compromised and sensitive data can be leaked. In recent years, WebAssembly has received considerable attention for its efficient application sandboxing suitable for embedded systems, making it a prime candidate for exploring a secure and portable sensor interface. This paper introduces the first WebAssembly System Interface (WASI) extension offering a secure, portable, and low-footprint sandbox enabling multi-tenant access to sensor data across heterogeneous embedded devices. The runtime extensions provide application memory isolation, ensure appropriate resource privileges by intercepting sensor access, and offer an MQTT-SN interface enabling in-network access control. When targeting the WebAssembly byte-code with the associated runtime extensions implemented atop the Zephyr RTOS, our evaluation of sensor access indicates a latency overhead of 6% with an additional memory footprint of 5% when compared to native execution. As MQTT-SN requests are dominated by network delays, the WASI-SN implementation of MQTT-SN introduces less than 1% additional latency with similar memory footprint.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2601_14555
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle WebAssembly Based Portable and Secure Sensor Interface for Internet of Things
Ou, Botong
Yang, Baijian
Cryptography and Security
Operating Systems
As the expansion of IoT connectivity continues to provide quality-of-life improvements around the world, they simultaneously introduce increasing privacy and security concerns. The lack of a clear definition in managing shared and protected access to IoT sensors offer channels by which devices can be compromised and sensitive data can be leaked. In recent years, WebAssembly has received considerable attention for its efficient application sandboxing suitable for embedded systems, making it a prime candidate for exploring a secure and portable sensor interface. This paper introduces the first WebAssembly System Interface (WASI) extension offering a secure, portable, and low-footprint sandbox enabling multi-tenant access to sensor data across heterogeneous embedded devices. The runtime extensions provide application memory isolation, ensure appropriate resource privileges by intercepting sensor access, and offer an MQTT-SN interface enabling in-network access control. When targeting the WebAssembly byte-code with the associated runtime extensions implemented atop the Zephyr RTOS, our evaluation of sensor access indicates a latency overhead of 6% with an additional memory footprint of 5% when compared to native execution. As MQTT-SN requests are dominated by network delays, the WASI-SN implementation of MQTT-SN introduces less than 1% additional latency with similar memory footprint.
title WebAssembly Based Portable and Secure Sensor Interface for Internet of Things
topic Cryptography and Security
Operating Systems
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.14555