alt Hacker NewsWe just can't trust dependencies and dev setups. I wanted to say "anymore" but we never could. Dev containers were never good enough, too clumsy and too little isolation. We need to start working in full sandboxes with defence in depth that have real guardrails and UIs like vm isolation + container primitives and allow lists, egress filters, seccomp, gvisor and more but with much better usability. Its the same requirements we have for agent runtimes, lets use this momentum to make our dev environments safer! In such an environment the container would crash, we see the violations, delete it and dont' have to worry about it. We should treat this as an everyday possibility not as an isolated security incident.
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"Anymore" is right though. This should be a call to change the global mindset regarding dependencies. We have to realize that the "good ol days" are behind us in order to take action.
Otherwise people will naysay and detract from the cause. "It worked before" they will say. "Why don't we do it like before?"
DISA STIG already forbids use of the EPEL for Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Enterprise software install instructions are littered with commands to turn off gpgcheck and install rpm's from sourceforge. The times are changing and we need cryptographically verifiable guarantees of safety!
Would value your opinion on my project to isolate creds from the container:
https://github.com/calebfaruki/tightbeam https://github.com/calebfaruki/airlock
This is literally the thing I'm trying to protect against.
So... I'm working on an open source technology to make a literal virtual machine shippable i.e. freezing everything inside it, isolated due to vm/hypervisor for sandboxing, with support for containers too since it's a real linux vm.
The problems you mentioned resonated a lot with me and why I'm building it, any interest in working to solve that together?: https://github.com/smol-machines/smolvm
> Dev containers were never good enough, too clumsy and too little isolation.
I haven't kept up with the recent exploits, so a side question: Have any of the recent supply chain attacks or related exploits included any escapes from basic dev containers?
We need programming languages where every imported module is in its own sandbox by default.
> In such an environment the container would crash, we see the violations, delete it and dont' have to worry about it.
This is the interesting part. What kind of UI or other mechanisms would help here? There's no silver bullet for detecting and crashing on "something bad". The adversary can test against your sandbox as well.
That's no solution. If you can't trust and/or verify dependencies, and they are malicious, then you have bigger problems than what a sandbox will protect against. Even if it's sandboxed and your host machine is safe, you're presumably still going to use that malicious code in production.
Sandboxes yes, but who even added the dependency? Half the projects I see have requirements.txt written by Copilot. AI says "add litellm", dev clicks accept, nobody even pins versions.
Then we talk about containment like anyone actually looked at that dep list.
I agree in general, but how are you ever upgrading any of that? Could be a "sleeper compromise" that only activates sometime in the future. Open problem.
> We just can't trust dependencies and dev setups.
Also, I typically only update dependencies when either an exploit is known in the current version or I need a feature present in a later version - and even then not to the absolute latest version if possible. I do this for all my projects under the many eyes principal. Finding exploits takes time, new updates are riskier than slightly-stale versions.
Though, if I'm filing a bug with a project, I do test and file against the latest version.
Containers prevent this kind of info stealing greatly, only explicitly provided creds would be leaked.
strongly agree. we keep giving away trust to other entities in order to make our jobs easier. trusting maintainers is still better than trusting a clanker but still risky. We need a sandboxed environment where we can build our software without having to worry about these unreliable factors.
On a personal note, I have been developing and talking to a clanker ( runs inside ) to get my day to day work done. I can have multiple instances of my project using worktrees, have them share some common dependencies and monitor all of them in one place. I plan to opensource this framework soon.
This stuff already exists - mobile phone sandboxed applications with intents (allow Pictures access, ...)
But mention that on HN and watch getting downvoted into oblivion: the war against general computation, walled gardens, locked down against device owners...
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This is the security shortcuts of the past 50 years coming back to bite us. Software has historically been a world where we all just trust each other. I think that’s coming to an end very soon. We need sandboxing for sure, but it’s much bigger than that. Entire security models need to be rethought.