ssh2 VS webcontainer-core

I found a node module called ssh2. It is possible to bundle node js via browserify/webpack, however there seems to be an issue with something called the crypto module. I found a repo discussing this, but I cannot point out if there is a working solution for this problem.

This was a fun little hack I wrote in NodeJS. I used the video-to-ascii project to output the Rickroll MP4 as a series of ASCII characters (it actually outputs a nice bash script). Then I wrote a small TCP server (for telnet) in NodeJS to simply pipe the output of the video bash script right to your telnet client! To add SSH support, I used the Node ssh2 library to create a simple SSH Server that is just piped to the telnet server (basically a proxy).

How does it work? There is no backend whatsoever. The API Security Academy leverages WebContainers, a new technology that allows running full-blown node instances directly in the browser. Each WebContainer contains a live GraphQL application, so you'll not only understand why a vulnerability is risky, but also how to exploit it and, most importantly, how to fix it.

StackBlitz made the claim "... run Node.js, entirely inside your browser" #658, then had to revise it's claim to "We currently do not expose a way to use WebContainer outside of StackBlitz.com,".

> Wasm though seems like the likely general heir, and will have many different offerings for how to do that (Deno being one!).

I was recently blown away by some ideas that StackBlitz [0] apply based on WebContainers. The idea of a "server in the browser", they allow you to run Node-based environment like that via Wasm.

[0] https://stackblitz.com/

[1] https://webcontainers.io/

See https://webcontainers.io.

This very simple fact is well known flaw, which was already often criticized and asked for solutions by users. It doesn't only affect this kind of very exotic bootstrap applications but also significantly limits rusts usefulness in many other areas. Pure browser based scientific code documentation and example notebooks (e.g. jupyterLite) and sandboxed CI and IDE solutions (e.g. web containers) as available for many other languages are simply not available for rust because of this very fundamental issue.

Looks like they plan to open it. From the FAQ section of README (https://github.com/stackblitz/webcontainer-core#faqs):

> Is there a developer API?

I'm skeptical about stackblitz claims. The last time I checked that is closed source code https://github.com/stackblitz/webcontainer-core/issues/658.

StackBlitz claimed https://blog.stackblitz.com/posts/introducing-webcontainers/ to have implemented Node.js in the browser, though I have not observed any evidence of that being true and correct https://github.com/stackblitz/webcontainer-core/issues/658.

The other honorable mention is StackBlitz, a web-based web editor for making containers that run Javascript applications. Interestingly, StackBlitz is championing WebContainers, a technology that allows developers to start NodeJS servers within the browser. The downside is, this technology only works with Javascript-based projects (NodeJS, NextJS, etc). I include it here because WebContainers could easily be extended to support other languages via WASM, like Ruby. I’ll also add in Buildah, a tool for building OCI images. I won’t say much about this tool because it’s designed for building images; you still need another service, like Podman, to actually create the containers.