Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by londons_explore 2374 days ago
Running as actual root in a VM would be my preferred design. There are lots of times a user might need to apt-get some dependencies for their compile job. Let an attacker do whatever they like in the VM. Then delete the VM between users.

Docker containers aren't really a good security barrier, and a VM is much better (although VM escape vulnerabilities aren't unheard of).

2 comments

There are many ways a hostile program inside a VM can escape it and run code on the host or, at least, negatively affect it.
Please do share how can one escape qemu.
Beautiful! Thank you.
Not many if its Qubes OS.
One would be quite enough.
In fact, Qubes is using hardware virtualization IOMMU/VT-d [0], which has been escaped only once in 2006 by the project founder [1].

[0] https://www.qubes-os.org/doc/architecture/

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Pill_(software)

I trust Joanna Rutkowska's competence, but I wouldn't bet too much on chip makers not messing up again in the future.

It will be progressively harder, but it will happen.

I don't know much containerization outside of docker, but you can definitely apt-get some dependencies even inside docker containers.
Inside a docker container, you are root, so you can apt-get.