As far as I know, Firecracker, gVisor, and Kata Containers are the solution here. They use VM primitives (x64_64 and ARM64 extensions) and have lighter codebases

https://firecracker-microvm.github.io/

https://gvisor.dev/

https://katacontainers.io/

But I don't have any direct experience with any of them. I'd be curious what people who have built on top of them think

edit: OK it looks like Kata can use Firecracker, so as far as isolation, it's either Firecracker or gVisor. And Firecracker is the VMM I mentioned, but gVisor is quite different -- it's more like a user space kernel that emulates syscalls.

We don't have any "security boundaries" by this definition, just "security make-it-harder"s. I.e. "security boundaries" always have a relative strength associated with them, not a guarantee they keep the thing secure without any doubts.

Depends on the threat model. Security is not black-and-white.

Containers protect against "I don't trust this curlpipe to not crap all over my dotfiles," rather than, "there might be a sandbox escape attack in this random file I downloaded."

If a VM is not sufficient for your threat model, I'm curious what is?

Podman supports using KVM backed virtualization for containers via libkrun: `podman run --runtime=krun` . Still not the end-all-be-all security boundary, but better I think.

I definitely wouldn't trust standard Linux style containers that expose a shared Linux kernel at the moment, there's been far too many LPE and container breakout vulnerabilities this year. It's possible that in future if the kernel gets a lot more hardened, that could change but things like Firecracker are a better bet from a security standpoint.

They are a security boundary, but like everything else, not perfect.

I think until something hardware-based like CHERI becomes widely deployed (which seems extremely unlikely in the near to mid term given), we're going to keep seeing VM escape CVEs pop up indefinitely.