FreeBSD Implements Unprivileged Chroot

This page summarizes the projects mentioned and recommended in the original post on news.ycombinator.com

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  • bubblewrap

    Low-level unprivileged sandboxing tool used by Flatpak and similar projects

    without being root. (This requires a sysctl to be enabled for unprivileged user namespaces, which is on by default in the kernel.org tree and I think all major distro kernels have it on now. The feature has been in the upstream kernel since 2013.)

    If you want to do this at scale, a handy tool is bwrap(1) from https://github.com/containers/bubblewrap . (The README talks about how bwrap is a setuid program to prevent the need for that sysctl, but it also works great as a non-setuid program when that sysctl is enabled, and its value is it has a bunch of handy command-line flags for this sort of thing. We use it extensively at my workplace in non-setuid mode for things that don't quite need containers but need to see alternative root directories etc.)

  • istio

    Connect, secure, control, and observe services.

    > You can work through a proxy program, but adding that complexity doesn't seem worthwhile to me unless your program to be sandboxed is very complex.

    I would love it if all network connections of all programs were created through a proxy. It would allow me to do load balancing, firewalling, tunneling, packet capturing, etc. etc. etc. entirely in userspace, without needing to rely on administrative features like pf/iptables, tun/tap, bpf, etc..

    You see that in Kubernetes land folks are trying to achieve the same thing by using so-called service meshes (e.g., https://istio.io ). Right now those systems launch a proxy next to every container. For projects like these, it would have been so much easier if UNIX-like systems already had a standard for making the network stack used by a program injectable.

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    Power Real-Time Data Analytics at Scale. Get real-time insights from all types of time series data with InfluxDB. Ingest, query, and analyze billions of data points in real-time with unbounded cardinality.

NOTE: The number of mentions on this list indicates mentions on common posts plus user suggested alternatives. Hence, a higher number means a more popular project.

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