Wasm-IO: Enabling Low-Level Device Interaction in WebAssembly for Industry Automation

Certification on a component level is highly beneficial in industrial automation because it allows for independent verification and updates without compromising the reliability of the overall system. Containerization technologies naturally address this demand by providing isolation between software modules. In particular, WebAssembly-based WebAssembly-based (Wasm) containerization is gaining popularity in industrial automation due to its inherent advantages, including cross-platform interoperability and secure execution of untrusted third-party code. However, Wasm’s strict sandboxing poses a significant limitation as it severely limits interaction with hardware devices, making it difficult to interface with sensors and actuators. This is a substantial barrier to adoption in industrial automation, where real-time and low-level hardware interactions are critical. To address this challenge, we present Wasm-IO , a framework designed to facilitate peripheral I/O operations within WASM containers. Wasm-IO allows the development of isolated device drivers in WASM, explicitly moving hardware interaction to the container level. Our architectural approach facilitates containers with hardware interaction to be independently certified, updated, and maintained without adversely affecting each other. This paper elucidates foundational methodologies and practical implementations supporting synchronous and asynchronous I/O operations and methods for embedding platform-independent peripheral configurations within WASM binaries. Additionally, we present an extended priority model enabling interrupt handling in WASM while maintaining temporal isolation. Our evaluation demonstrates that Wasm-IO significantly reduces latency and overhead compared to existing methods and traditional user-level driver implementations, effectively addressing certification and functional requirements critical to industrial automation systems.