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How is the isolation in Xen better than Chrome sandboxes - do you mean the attack surface is smaller, the code quality better, or the task somehow inherently si
by zurn 13y ago
How is the isolation in Xen better than Chrome sandboxes - do you mean the attack surface is smaller, the code quality better, or the task somehow inherently simpler/easier?
From where I sit, vulnerabilities in virtualization have seen less public scrutiny than the Chrome sandbox. Eg none of the hypervisor vendors have a bug bounty program, which would be at least some kind of signal.
- throwaway7767 13y agoThe attack surface of a paravirtualized Xen VM to its hypervisor is much smaller than a linux application talking to the linux kernel. Of course it's not perfect, but xen has a pretty good track record. And a significant chunk of the flaws that have been found xen were found by the qubes devs.
- zurn 13y agoThe Chrome sandbox setup doesn't correspond to a regular linux application talking to the kernel though. It has a 2-layer sandbox, with the seccomp-bpf and setuid sandboxes. They restrict the kernel interface to a whitelisted subset.