Comment by saidnooneever
2 days ago
just sandbox the interpreter (in this case), package manager and binaries.
u can run in chroot jail and it wouldnt have accessed ssh keys outside of the jail...
theres many more similar technologies aleady existing, for decades.
doing it on a per language basis is not ideal. any new language would have to reinvent the wheel.
better to do it at system level. with the already existing tooling.
openbsd has plege/unveil, linux chroot, namespaces, cgroups, freebsd capsicum or w/e. theres many of these things.
(i am not sure how well they play within these scenarios, but just triggering on the sandboxing comment. theres plenty of ways to do it as far as i can tell...)
What if I wanted to write a program that uses untrusted libraries, but also does some very security sensitive stuff? You are probably going to suggest splitting the program into microservices. But that has a lot of problems and makes things slow.
The problem is that programs can be entire systems, so "doing it at the system level" still means that you'd have to build boundaries inside a program.
you can do multi process things. or drop privs when using untrusted things.
you can use OS apis to isolate the thing u want to use just fine..
and yes, if you mix privilege levels in a program by design then u will have to design your program for that.
this is simple logic.
a programming language can not decide for you who and what you trust.
> you can use OS apis to isolate the thing u want to use just fine..
For the sake of the argument, what if I wanted to isolate numpy from scipy?
Would you run numpy in a separate process from scipy? How would you share data between them?
Yes, you __can__ do all of that without programming language support. However, language support can make it much easier.