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Sandboxed components are good at mitigating attacks from the outside. However they don’t help much against a malicious package author who has a multitude of dif
by zarzavat 5y ago
Sandboxed components are good at mitigating attacks from the outside. However they don’t help much against a malicious package author who has a multitude of different ways of causing havoc: while(1); for example. Playing this game of cat and mouse will add so much red tape that nobody will want to use that package manager anymore.
Ultimately package repos run on trust and a low level of risk is tolerated because of the benefits of being able to get stuff done.
- nindalf 5y agoMitigation strategies while(1) - kill -9 / Task Manager / Activity Monitor All files deleted - cry.
- vladvasiliu 5y ago> Playing this game of cat and mouse will add so much red tape that nobody will want to use that package manager anymore. Of course. But your comment still reads as "we can't make it perfect, so might as well not try at all". I think there can still be value in limiting the blast radius. Your while(1), if present, is likely to be intentionally malicious. But I've seen many naïve libraries implement "accidentally quadratic" algorithms, which is basically a disguised while(1), but unintentional. The point is that the end result of `rm -rf /` is painful. It doesn't matter if someone managed to maliciously sneak that into your supply chain, or if it rises from some funky corner case of some package whose only goal is to bring world peace. So being able to prevent some leftpad lib from accessing the file system at all makes a lot of sense.
- Legogris 5y ago> while(1) In SES, that is controlled by allowing assignment of a budget and failing if it's exceeded. Similar to how gas works in the EVM.