[ashishbijlani]

I’ve created Packj sandbox [1] for “safe installation” of PyPI/NPM/Rubygems packages

1. https://github.com/ossillate-inc/packj

It DOES NOT require a VM/Container; uses strace. It shows you a preview of file system changes that installation will make and can also block arbitrary network communication during installation (uses an allow-list).

[remram]

strace uses ptrace, which is not safe for security use because of race conditions. Linux Security Modules should be used.

https://stackoverflow.com/a/4421762/711380

[ashishbijlani]

Thanks for highlighting this! While PTRACE introduces TOCTTOU vulnerabilities, Packj sandboxes fixes that by using read-only args for ptrace. You can find my PhD work [1] on this relevant.

1. https://lwn.net/Articles/803890/