Is WebAssembly the Secure, Efficient Alternative Everybody was Waiting for?

Aug 18, 2025

In this engaging conversation, Geoffroy Couprie, a Rust engineer at ProtonMail, and Laurent Doguin, Director of Developer Relations at Cashbase, delve into the cutting-edge world of WebAssembly. They discuss the evolution of Wasm from a web technology to a pivotal server-side solution, emphasizing its advantages in application security and isolation. The duo shares strategies to optimize virtual machine boot times to just one millisecond and examines the challenges of integrating Wasm with Kubernetes, exploring its ongoing evolution in the tech ecosystem.

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INSIGHT

Isolation Is The Core Serverless Problem

Running untrusted code requires strong isolation because a misbehaving process can affect the kernel and the whole machine.
WebAssembly provides a low-permission bytecode VM that defaults to denying access and lets the runtime explicitly grant capabilities.

ANECDOTE

From Three Days Hack To VM Idea

Geoffroy experimented with compiling Wasm to native code and running it inside minimal VMs without an OS.
He found the runtime only needs to expose exactly the APIs the app requires, enabling tiny, secure VMs.

ADVICE

Design For Tiny, Cheap, Secure Execution

Optimize for both security and cost when building serverless runtimes by minimizing the attack surface and boot time.
Aim for very small VMs or runtimes to enable scale-to-zero pricing and efficient concurrency.

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