herkos

⚠️ This project is work in progress! Not all wasm features nor corner cases were tested!

A compilation pipeline that transpiles WebAssembly modules into memory-safe Rust code with compile-time isolation guarantees, replacing runtime hardware-based memory protection (MMU/MPU) with type-system-enforced safety.

WebAssembly → Rust source → Safe binary

Motivation

Safety-critical standards (ISO 26262, IEC 61508, DO-178C) require freedom from interference between software modules of different criticality levels. Typically this is achieved via MMU/MPU or hypervisors, approaches that are expensive in cpu time performance, energy, and certification effort.

herkos takes a different approach: if the Rust compiler accepts the transpiled code, isolation is guaranteed; no MMU, no context switches, no runtime overhead for proven accesses.

Still we have a challenge: how to do efficient communication between "compile-time-mmu" partitions? This will be one of the things this project will explore.

Architecture

The project is a Rust workspace with three core crates:

Crate	Purpose
herkos	CLI transpiler: parses .wasm binaries, emits Rust source code
herkos-runtime	#![no_std] runtime library shipped with transpiled output (IsolatedMemory, capability types, Wasm operations)

Features:

• compile time isolation
• compile time capability based security access via traits

Build and test

cargo build                    # build all crates
cargo test                     # run all tests
cargo clippy --all-targets     # lint
cargo fmt --check              # format check

Run a single crate's tests:

cargo test -p herkos
cargo test -p herkos-runtime
cargo test -p herkos-tests

Usage

cargo run -p herkos -- input.wasm --output output.rs

License

Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (LICENSE)