Demonstration of Attack enabled by AsyncContext

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Mark S. Miller

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Jan 11, 2023, 4:54:11 PM1/11/23
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I wrote the attack I explained at the last minute of Today's SES meeting.

Justin Ridgewell

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Jan 11, 2023, 7:21:18 PM1/11/23
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See my response at https://github.com/endojs/endo/pull/1424#pullrequestreview-1244775356.

In summary, I don't believe this is an actual attack because:

1. Carol can detect the async context state of the callback's invocation, even if the callbacks are `===`.
2. Carol can censor the async context state to an empty state if she desired.

I think the current code as "not AsyncContext aware", but when they're added to the language, membranes will need to update. In fact, if we wanted to fully support a membrane across realms/computers/etc, the membrane would need to snapshot the current async context state when a callback is passed to the other side, so that it can be restored when the other side finally invokes that callback.
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