alt Hacker NewsWhat 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.
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> It's very painful to sandbox software from the outside and it's radically less effective because your sandbox is always maximally permissive.
Not really.
Let's say I am running `~/src/project1 $ litellm`
Why does this need access to anything outside of `~/src/project1`?
Even if it does, you should expose exactly those particular directories (e.g. ~/.config) and nothing else.
If the whole point of sandboxing is to not trust the software, it doesn't make sense for the software to do the sandboxing. (At most it should have a standard way to suggest what access it needs, and then your outside tooling should work with what's reasonable and alert on what isn't.) The android-like approach of sandboxing literally everything works because you are forced to solve these problems generically and at scale - things like "run this as a distinct uid" are a lot less hassle if you're amortizing it across everything.
(And no, most linux namespace stuff does not require root, the few things that do can be provided in more-controlled ways. For examples, look at podman, not docker.)