The spectrum of isolation: From bare metal to WebAssembly

The spectrum comes with multiple tradeoffs, and isn't a simple "bare metal is more secure" narrative. Because as you move into VMs, containers, and code sandboxes, you lose isolation which increases risks, but you also gain capabilities to limit the application which decreases risk. So I believe the most secure approach is layered with much multiple types of isolation working together.

For example, you may isolate a specific customer to bare metal so an escape doesn't compromise other customers. But within that bare metal, you may run containers because they make it easier to work with a read only root filesystem that's also trivial to upgrade. You can also add on user namespaces and seccomp in the container to minimize the risk of a container escape. And then the application may have its own sandbox that limits individual capabilities and which API calls it can run.

Every use case is different, and some layers may not be available depending on that use case. But rather than picking one point on the spectrum, one should pick a list of technologies that best solve each use case.

Ah, I think I found the reason as to why WebAssembly (in a browser or some other sandboxed environment) is not a suitable substrate for near native performance. It is a very ironic reason: you can't implement a JIT compiler that targets WebAssembly in a sandbox running in WebAssembly. Sounds like an incredibly contrived thing to do but once speed is the goal then a copy-and-patch compiler is a valid strategy for implementing a interpreter or a modern graphics pipeline.

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My uBlock origin shows that googlefonts.com and fonts.googleapis.com are being blocked.

It irks me a bit that your message explicitly mentions two trackers but it fails to mention the Google tracking. Google is also not mentioned in your privacy policy. Is there a reason for this?

venv and sandboxes are such categorically different things that painting it as a spectrum the way this article does is more misleading than helpful.

I also think the article shouldn't mention chroot. From the man page:

> In particular, it is not intended to be used for any kind of security purpose,

I guess it could be part of a sandbox, but there are better tools for that purpose.

(I'm not sure what point there is in giving feedback on an article that's almost entirely LLM-generated, though.)

I wrote this because I kept seeing developers (myself included) confuse language-level isolation like Python venv with OS-level isolation like Docker. I wanted to trace the actual technical boundaries between them.

The article maps out the differences between common execution environments—from physical bare metal and VMs to containers, process sandboxes, and virtual environments—to create a mental model of where the "isolation boundary" actually sits for each tool.

WebAssembly somehow does not seem to be able to break-through, unlike HTML, CSS, JavaScript did.