rexec questions

[Roman Suzi]

On Mon, 6 Aug 2001, Alex Martelli wrote:

-skip-

>Right, but, again, you can easily wrap the socket module to
>control what happens -- put your own wrapper in a directory
>on the ok_path, make sure it's also in sys.modules['socket']
>so that trusted Python-coded networking modules that may
>be called from untrusted code will also use your wrapper when
>connecting sockets, and there you are.
>
>rexec is something of a 'sandbox construction toolkit' (together
>with Bastion) rather than a finished piece of work -- probably
>because there isn't much current interest in controlled execution
>
>of untrusted Python code, so rexec didn't (I think) mature much
>after work on Grail more or less stopped.

I've heard Mozilla will have Python applets. How will it
rexec them?

>But there are surely
>other interesting applications for sandboxes for untrusted code,
>so it may be time to design and implement a rexec2 successor,
>building upon rexec to add easier customization of security
>(controlled imports of non-builtin modules too, connections
>only to hosts on a trusted list, whatever...).

That is what Java's Security Manager (sp?) does. This can
probably be explained by Python's usage areas. Python is
not used in applets extensively (if at all).


Sincerely yours, Roman Suzi
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