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Today, with public hosting nearly universally offering VMs instead of traditional user accounts on a single operating system - never mind the whole Docker trend
by comex 12y ago
Today, with public hosting nearly universally offering VMs instead of traditional user accounts on a single operating system - never mind the whole Docker trend of giving every single piece of the application its own virtual OS install - are "large multi-user systems" even worth worrying about anymore?
But this is basically orthogonal to the modern application of (OS-level) privilege boundaries, which is to protect the user from compromised application processes. This escalation doesn't let someone "take over your computer without you doing anything" by itself, but once someone has exploited an IE bug and found themselves able to run arbitrary code on users' computers in a sandbox - which happens all the time - that's exactly what it allows.
- mjevans 12y agoThe short answer is yes; such operating systems are required to run Docker, LXC and other approaches which all utilize similar tools. I'm not that familliar with Docker but looking at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Docker_%28software%29 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Docker_%28software%29 it is built on the same resource isolation features as LXC which I am using on two of my test systems. The resource isolation features are, in fact, built on top of a large multi-user system, which happens to have powerful security context support and abstractions built in. The contained applications operate, from a userspace perspective, as if they are their own system when in reality their kernel is actually the host kernel and their users really virtually re-mapped to distinct accounts within the host kernel.