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New Sandbox Framework For Chromium Released
Trailrunner7 writes "As applications have become more and more complex in recent years and Web browsers have evolved into operating systems unto themselves, the task of securing desktop environments has become increasingly difficult. And while there's been quite a bit of innovation on Windows security, advances in Unix security have been less common of late. But now, a group of researchers from Google and the University of Cambridge in England have developed a new sandboxing framework called Capsicum, designed specifically to provide better security capabilities on Unix and Unix-derived systems (PDF). Capsicum is the work of four researchers at Cambridge and the framework extends the POSIX API and introduces a number of new Unix primitives that are meant to isolate applications and users and handle rights delegation in a better way. The research, done by Robert N.M. Watson, Ben Laurie, Kris Kennaway and Jonathan Anderson, was supported by Google, and the researchers have added some of the new Capsicum features to a version of Google's Chromium browser in order to demonstrate the functionality."
Is this supposed to be the Google Chrome browser? Or do they mean literally a browser in their upcoming OS Chromium?
Do not argue with an idiot. He will drag you down to his level and beat you with experience.
They say that they have working code for FreeBSD release-8. It makes me wonder if there is some relationship between Capsicum and FBSD's jails, or if FBSD is just being used because it is an environment of interest with the security/sandboxing community right now.
It looks like user-space extension which you have to use, if you wanna your application to be sandboxed. But what about the malicious applications which don't wanna to be sandboxed???
Was running this Sandbox yesterday.
Sounds like the permissions you specify for Android apps. That's all fine and dandy for a new platform and we all wish someone had bothered to require least privileges back in the day for our favorite OS, but they didn't. And if they had, it would have been too much work to program for anyway, so something else would have become our favorite OS. So now we have to port all our code to use a new scheme and that's far more work than anyone is willing to do. So we'll remain insecure. Case in point: selinux. Sounds good in principle, but those of us who need to get stuff done don't have time for it.
"Web browsers have evolved into operating systems"
No, they haven't, calm down.
These are major and invasive changes to POSIX. No reasonable person would expect to be able to do things like change PID semantics or shared memory. Yes, it might solve the problem that they sought to solve. But I would be very surprised to see this meet with any large-scale deployment. It's better to work with the system than to just arbitrarily decide Unix is wrong and rewrite it.
My Systems
Web browsers have evolved into operating systems unto themselves
Really? I am unaware of a (common) browser that is able to do much more than work with data...
Let's try to leave the the analogies used to educated luddites out of summaries intended for people that *KNOW* the difference between an OS and an application.
No comprende? Let me type that a little slower for you...
Chromium is the open source version that Chrome, the proprietary browser, is built on. (Basically, they take Chromium, add codecs they can't legally include in Chromium, maybe a little branding, and release it as Chrome.)
The same is true of the OS -- the only reason it's "Chromium OS" is that the actual "Chrome OS" hasn't been released yet, because the community version isn't done yet.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
... When will we see implantations of this in Linux, *BSD, and, even, commercial Unix flavors ?
Y'know, I'm really glad Google wants to provide a new API for managing security. We need somebody to do this for us - somebody who really knows security, somebody who may as well have security as their middle name, to come out with an API framework for Mandatory Access Controls, preferably built right into th operating system kernel of a major distribution.
Yes, I'm really glad Google took the initiative on this.
www.eFax.com are spammers
... there's been quite a bit of innovation on Windows security ...
What? There has? Do you mean the way it now asks me 'Are you sure you want to give this application a chance to destroy your computer? Y/N' and if I say 'No' I can't use the application?
I mean, if I really want to run that application I have no choice but to click 'Yes' and then if it was a virus after all I'm screwed.
What I'd want is a way to have more control over the program. Maybe put it in a sandbox and trick it into thinking it's got full privileges even though it's really sandboxed so it won't crash or maybe just set advanced settings for that specific application to disallow it from writing to specific registry/files/network/other process' memory.
Which is just as well, since I was torn between Informative and Funny. B-)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
This may serve well to provide sandboxing for Android in place of Java
Have you got your LWN subscription yet?
It's too much to ask of IE, though if they did a good job it would reset the bar for awesome, but won't the other major browsers just break down and host an embedded emacs?
As always, all IMO. Insert "I think" everywhere grammatically possible.
http://www.trustedbsd.org/2010usenix-security-capsicum-website.pdf
It makes very little sense to sandbox the application. sandboxing should be delegated from the application to the OS. I note that mac OSX have this built into the OS, but only a few applications like xgrid actually use it. The good news is that apps don't need to be sandbox aware to be sandboxed after the fact. I saw on mac osxhints were someone wrote a sandbox config file for firefox that forces firefox to run with reduced privledges and disk access.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
That's Robert Watson of the FreeBSD project who designed the DARPA-sponsored TrustedBSD security framework used in the iPhone, Ben Laurie who wrote OpenSSL and parts of Apache, and Kris Kennaway who worked on FreeBSD 7 SMP performance. Secure, powerful, and fast?
...before it came an OS, that is Win3.x series (Win95 can be called OS, although DOS based but Win 3.x was not OS but one would not call it just a toolkit either).
In capitalist USA corporations control the government.