alt Hacker NewsI think we really need to use sandboxes. Guix provides sandboxed environments by just flipping a switch. NixOS is in an ideal position to do the same, but for some reason they are regarded as "inconvenient".
Personally, I am a heavy user of Firejail and bwrap. We need defense in depth. If someone in the supply chain gets compromised, damage should be limited. It's easy to patch the security model of Linux with userspaces, and even easier with eBPF, but the community is somehow stuck.
What would be really helpful is if software sandboxed itself. It's very painful to sandbox software from the outside and it's radically less effective because your sandbox is always maximally permissive.
But, sadly, there's no x-platform way to do this, and sandboxing APIs are incredibly bad still and often require privileges.
> It's easy to patch the security model of Linux with userspaces, and even easier with eBPF, but the community is somehow stuck.
Neither of these is easy tbh. Entering a Linux namespace requires root, so if you want your users to be safe then you have to first ask them to run your service as root. eBPF is a very hard boundary to maintain, requiring you to know every system call that your program can make - updates to libc, upgrades to any library, can break this.
Sandboxing tooling is really bad.