4 ms·

I guess to take this a bit further, the thought that came to mind for me is if we start processing every user on their own vm with own core and memory. Is that

I guess to take this a bit further, the thought that came to mind for me is if we start processing every user on their own vm with own core and memory. Is that something anyone is doing today with web sites? It'd seemingly be horribly inefficient, but it's an interesting thought experiment.

catern 10y ago
Yes, that's a fascinating new technique, known as "CGI scripting".
masklinn 10y ago
> Is that something anyone is doing today with web sites? It's a pretty common unikernel demo, see erlang on xen's "zerg" for instance: http://zerg.erlangonxen.org http://zerg.erlangonxen.org The Mirage project's Jitsu also does something similar (though not identical): https://github.com/mirage/jitsu https://github.com/mirage/jitsu
abrookewood 10y ago
It's not that inefficient if you are not working with real 'VMs', but with containers (or something similar). The unikernel projects mentioned by the peer below (Ling, MirageOS) can spin up a container per request, respond and then tear it down in milliseconds. They are pretty interesting from a security perspective, especially when you couple them with a read-only image - I imagine it would be pretty hard to attack something that only persists for the time it takes to handle a single request. EDIT: Peer is below.
- icebraining 10y ago
  I imagine it would be pretty hard to attack something that only persists for the time it takes to handle a single request. I don't see why. If the request is the attack (as it usually is), then it'll persist for just long enough to accomplish it. What kind of attacks do you see it avoiding?
  - mtrpcic 10y ago
    I think the big benefit is that it avoids attacks that infect the server, because in this case, the server is "destroyed" when the request finishes. So a request that would maliciously upload "hackertools.php" would be useless, because the host (read: container) that the file is uploaded to is not the web server, but the container.
    - abrookewood 10y ago
      Yes, this is what I meant. It doesn't make the server any less vulnerable to an individual attack, but it makes it very hard to escalate it. Though there was a really interesting video about a security guy breaking out of Lambda recently and uncovering a persistent file system somewhere - will try to find it. Edit: Found it: https://media.ccc.de/v/33c3-7865-gone_in_60_milliseconds https://media.ccc.de/v/33c3-7865-gone_in_60_milliseconds

catern 10y ago

Yes, that's a fascinating new technique, known as "CGI scripting".

masklinn 10y ago

> Is that something anyone is doing today with web sites? It's a pretty common unikernel demo, see erlang on xen's "zerg" for instance: http://zerg.erlangonxen.org http://zerg.erlangonxen.org The Mirage project's Jitsu also does something similar (though not identical): https://github.com/mirage/jitsu https://github.com/mirage/jitsu

abrookewood 10y ago

It's not that inefficient if you are not working with real 'VMs', but with containers (or something similar). The unikernel projects mentioned by the peer below (Ling, MirageOS) can spin up a container per request, respond and then tear it down in milliseconds. They are pretty interesting from a security perspective, especially when you couple them with a read-only image - I imagine it would be pretty hard to attack something that only persists for the time it takes to handle a single request. EDIT: Peer is below.

icebraining 10y ago
I imagine it would be pretty hard to attack something that only persists for the time it takes to handle a single request. I don't see why. If the request is the attack (as it usually is), then it'll persist for just long enough to accomplish it. What kind of attacks do you see it avoiding?
- mtrpcic 10y ago
  I think the big benefit is that it avoids attacks that infect the server, because in this case, the server is "destroyed" when the request finishes. So a request that would maliciously upload "hackertools.php" would be useless, because the host (read: container) that the file is uploaded to is not the web server, but the container.
  - abrookewood 10y ago
    Yes, this is what I meant. It doesn't make the server any less vulnerable to an individual attack, but it makes it very hard to escalate it. Though there was a really interesting video about a security guy breaking out of Lambda recently and uncovering a persistent file system somewhere - will try to find it. Edit: Found it: https://media.ccc.de/v/33c3-7865-gone_in_60_milliseconds https://media.ccc.de/v/33c3-7865-gone_in_60_milliseconds