Comment by schainks
20 hours ago
My read on this is they re-invented the OTP supervision tree, process isolation, hibernation, and actor-to-actor message passing, but had to push the isolation boundary all the way down into Ring -1 (KVM/Cloud Hypervisor) and customized Linux tinyconfig kernels because their "actors" are actively trying to jailbreak the hypervisor.
Is that about right?
No, that's pretty overwritten. The simple story is: like most neocloud providers, they were using Docker and/or Linux containers as a workload isolation primitive, those have never been safe, and they've now worked out how to scale actual KVM isolation to their users.
A thing I wish more people would do: ask prospective cloud hosting companies "is there a mode of this offering where my workloads might share a kernel with other tenants I don't trust, as would be the case with Docker?", and if the answer to that question is ever "yes", disqualify the provider.
WHAT? I had once went into an absolute rabbithole into a similar topic and not in my wildest dreams could I have imagined that Replit (or others) are just using normal docker for the workload.
I thought that the case of security was better within the industry and that the industry would be punished for bad security practices.
What were the engineers of Replit doing then? Even with a generous perspective, I fail to understand how they couldn't have pushed back against it just until now. This is unacceptable in many ways.
The engineers must have realized that the security that they had was mostly just all duct tape? (because if not then it's a bigger problem)
or is it just something about how startups operate or the incentive structures of the corporation that I am failing to understand?
What you must understand is business. Bad security practices haven't resulted in punishment that makes businesses take security seriously. At the end of the day, they may even be right about it. If it costs $10,000 to break down the door, but behind the door is only $100, why are you spending $10,000?
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