ducalpha/visiblev8

VisibleV8

Patches and build tools (with some tests) for turning Chromium into VisibleV8.

The core patches are architecture and platform agnostic, but some of the logging code currently has implementation-detail dependencies on Linux. The [optional] build system is definitely Linux-specific.

Quick Start

(These instructions are for building VV8 on Chromium 75. Find commit hashes of other versions here, but make sure there's a matching patchset in patches/ in this repository.)

• Make sure you have Docker and Python 3 and a lot of free disk space (e.g., 50GiB) for downloading and building Chromium
• Clone this repository (we will call the cloned working directory $VV8)
• Create an empty working directory on a device with enough space to check out and build Chromium (we will call this directory $WD)
• Run $VV8/builder/tool.py -d $WD checkout 5afa96dadfe803e8a058d6ede0c9c3987405b8d8
  • This will take a while: it has to check out all the code and run initial software installation steps
  • All tool installation will be captured in a Docker container image that can be reused for all future builds of this version of Chromium
• Run patch -p1 <$VV8/patches/5afa96dadfe803e8a058/trace-apis.diff from inside $WD/src/v8
• Run $VV8/builder/tool.py -d $WD build @std
  • This will really take a while: it has to build all of Chromium and [Visible]V8, and V8's unit tests, and the Chromium installer Debian package
  • All these artifacts will be left in $WD/src/out/Builder
  • You can specify one or more of Chromium's Ninja build targets in place of our magic placeholder @std (e.g., d8)
• Optionally, run $VV8/builder/tool.py -d $WD install to create a new Docker image with the Chromium/VV8 build installed as the entry-point (for running the tests and/or building your own Puppeteer-based applications using Chromium/VV8 for instrumentation)

Log Output

VV8 produces trace logs in the browser's current working directory. The current builds thus require the Chrome sandbox to be disabled (--no-sandbox) so VV8 can create and write to log files on demand. Note that the default Docker images produced by the install step above do not include the --no-sandbox argument (or any arguments) to the entry-point, chrome.

Project Contents

• The build tool source and resources (in builder/) simplifies building and installing custom Chromium variants
• The patchset directory (patches/) includes information on what Chromium versions are supported
• The tests directory (tests/) includes JS source and expected log files to help regression-test updates to VV8, and also contains documentation of the log format[s]

Research Paper

You can read more about the details of our work in the following research paper:

VisibleV8: In-browser Monitoring of JavaScript in the Wild [PDF]
Jordan Jueckstock, Alexandros Kapravelos
Proceedings of the ACM Internet Measurement Conference (IMC), 2019

If you use VisibleV8 in your research, consider citing our work using this Bibtex entry:

@conference{vv8-imc19,
  title = {{VisibleV8: In-browser Monitoring of JavaScript in the Wild}},
  author = {Jueckstock, Jordan and Kapravelos, Alexandros},
  booktitle = {{Proceedings of the ACM Internet Measurement Conference (IMC)}},
  year = {2019}
}