Sandboxing in Linux with Zero Lines of Code

Linux seccomp is a simple, powerful tool to sandbox running processes and can significantly decrease damage in case the application code gets exploited. It provides fine-grained controls for the process to declare what it can and can’t do and in most cases has little performance overhead.

But to utilise this framework developers have to explicitly add sandboxing code to their projects and developers usually either delay this or omit completely. Moreover, the seccomp security model is based around system calls, but many developers, writing their code in high-level programming languages and frameworks, either have little knowledge or no experience with syscalls or just don’t have easy-to-use seccomp abstractions for their frameworks.

All this makes seccomp not widely adopted—but what if there was a way to easily sandbox any application in any programming language without writing a single line of code? This presentation discusses potential approaches with their pros and cons.