README.md

sandbox

Rust helpers for running functions in sandboxed environments.

Usage

Not yet available on crates.io - unstable, unversioned, unverified.

Notes On Sandbox Composition

This library allows you to build and stack sandbox descriptions and then build the sandbox in one shot. This approach does not compose well - one sandbox may require rights that a previous sandbox removed. Sandboxes may only partially execute before returning an error.

To cope with this I highly suggest you pay attention to the order in which the sandboxes are executed, and write tests for your sandboxes.

Notes on performance

The cost of the sandbox includes:

• At least one fork (descriptors may incur their own forking)
• Serialization of function results - in order to return a value from the sandbox it must be serialized.

Notes on security

If we imagine that your sandbox is 'perfect' and the attacker has no access to the system, then the path of least resistance is the broker process - the process that creates the sandbox. In particular, the serialization library is directly exposed to the attacker since they can potentially control return values.

I have not looked at the serialization library at all. I do not know if it uses unsafe code.

Example

let sandbox = Sandbox::new_with_descriptors(vec![
    // Create a Unix sandbox that will run code from the nobody user in a chroot with no
    // permissions
    Box::new(
        UnixDacSandboxBuilder::new()
        .with_uid(UidOrGid::Nobody)
        .with_gid(UidOrGid::Nobody)
        .with_chroot(Path::new("/run/sandbox/")) // create this beforehand
        .into_descriptor()
        )
    ]);

let value = "yo";

let result = sandbox.execute(|| {
    assert_eq!(getuid(), 65534);
    assert_eq!(getgid(), 65534);

    // Do scary things!
    format!("{}, I'm running in a sandbox", value) // capture variables
});

assert_eq!(result.unwrap(), "yo, I'm running in a sandbox");

In order to build you'll need to use a specific nightly, try:

  rustup override add nightly-2016-06-09