oss-sec mailing list archives
sandboxing,of upstream programs by distros
From: Matthew Fernandez <matthew.fernandez () gmail com>
Date: Sat, 14 Oct 2023 18:39:49 +1100
Hi all,I asked Alexander about this off-list in relation to his thread “linux-distros list membership application - CIQ Rocky Linux Security Team” but he suggested I bring it on-list instead.
Is there interest/solutions within the Rock Security SIG or other distro’s security teams for sandboxing that package upstreams can opt into?
To step this out a bit… we have a large, old code base that was written decades prior to current best practices. It has numerous known memory safety issues and ever-dwindling maintainer capacity. It is also a dependency, either directly or indirectly, of a significant fraction of the world’s software. I am guessing this scenario sounds uncomfortably familiar/common to many on this list.
We (the maintainers) have discussed sandboxing as a way of mitigating the risk of known bugs. However, one of the problems is that we don’t know the complete set of required privileges of our dependencies. The software can be configured with or without various libraries and also has a plugin mechanism for dynamic code loading. Basically if a sandboxing solution like seccomp wants to know our full set of system calls, we ourselves don’t know it.
The downstream maintainer packaging the software for, e.g. Rocky, does though. They have a complete picture of which libraries/features are enabled and how locked down the plugin stuff is.
So, where I’m going with this, is that if the various packaging ecosystems could (or do) offer sandboxing to upstream, people like us would gladly opt in to it. Of course, these downstream maintainers can already seccomp our software today. But expecting them to reverse engineer our exact needs seems a bit much.
I’d be interested to hear any thoughts on this. Thanks, Matt
Current thread:
- sandboxing,of upstream programs by distros Matthew Fernandez (Oct 14)
- Re: sandboxing,of upstream programs by distros Demi Marie Obenour (Oct 14)
- Re: sandboxing,of upstream programs by distros Matthew Fernandez (Oct 14)
- Re: sandboxing,of upstream programs by distros Solar Designer (Oct 21)
- Re: sandboxing,of upstream programs by distros Demi Marie Obenour (Oct 22)
- Re: sandboxing,of upstream programs by distros Bob Friesenhahn (Oct 22)
- Re: sandboxing,of upstream programs by distros Demi Marie Obenour (Oct 22)
- Re: sandboxing,of upstream programs by distros Bob Friesenhahn (Oct 22)
- Re: sandboxing,of upstream programs by distros Demi Marie Obenour (Oct 22)
- Re: sandboxing,of upstream programs by distros Demi Marie Obenour (Oct 14)
- Re: sandboxing,of upstream programs by distros Mickaël Salaün (Oct 22)
- Re: sandboxing,of upstream programs by distros Matthew Fernandez (Oct 22)