Creating a capabilities-based restricted execution system

Sean R. Lynch seanl at chaosring.org
Sat Jan 3 13:25:40 EST 2004


John Roth wrote:

> Yes,  you're missing something really obvious. Multi-level
> security is a real difficult problem if you want to solve it
> in a believable (that is, bullet-proof) fashion. The only way
> I know of solving it is to provide separate execution
> environments for the different privilege domains.
> In the current Python structure, that means different
> interpreters so that the object structures don't intermix.

Hmmm, can you give me an example of a Python application that works this 
way? Zope seems to be doing fine using RestrictedPython. 
RestrictedPython is, in fact, an attempt to provide different execution 
environments within the same memory space, which is the whole point of 
my exercise. Now, I know that the lack of an example of insecurity is 
not proof of security, but can you think of a way to escape from 
RestrictedPython's environment? DoS is still possible, but as I'm not 
planning on using this for completely untrusted users, I'm not too 
concerned about that.



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