Rodrigo Kumpera, one of our VM developers has completed the instruction verifier for Mono's virtual machine. This effort started in June of last year.
The verifier is a late addition to the Mono VM as it was not a priority to run untrusted code inside the virtual machine.
But as Mono user base grew, it became important to support this feature. Second Life needs this to run potentially malicious code that is uploaded by a user, and we need this to provide an execution sandbox when running Moonlight on the browser.
Rodrigo did this work in stages: the first stage was to add support for the 1.0 virtual machine opcodes. Once that was done, verificiation for the 2.0 generic instructions was added.
This is an important milestone in our support for Silverlight 2.0 support on Linux.
Congratulations to Rodrigo for his work!
Posted on 30 Apr 2008