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Software sandboxing: The basics (2025)

116 points · 24 comments · mococa

  1. sieve · · focus · HN ↗
    I became interested in sandboxing last month after watching LLMs fail to respect basic boundaries. Well, the very expectation that they would is foolish in the first place.

    I am not a fan of application-level sandboxing. The JVM tried with its security manager, and Deno with its allow/deny, but it is not general enough for me. At some point you have to assume that anything you run on your machine is possibly broken/compromised and then deal with the situation depending on your risk appetite.

    This is a long story that I have written about on my blog, but I decided to go down the Bubblewrap + seccomp + socat route for the sandboxing tool I built. Let's me run harnesses and compilers and even headless Firefox in sandboxes without worrying about damage to random parts of my system.

    1. selicos · · focus · HN ↗
      >At some point you have to assume that anything you run on your machine is possibly broken/compromised

      You have to treat AI like has 'physical' access to where you are running it, Dev VM or laptop or in a browser. Anything connected to that which you or the context the AI is running under can access or exploit/abuse is at risk, almost as if an attacker had physical access.

      It's like when I set was set up as a new SysAdmin with only view rights to Active Directory. I could not be trusted until proven otherwise (pass training) and I'm a human that can be held accountable.

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