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How easy is it for a developer to "sandbox" a program?


Sandboxing is when a developer limits available system resources to a program from within its own source code. A classic example is calling chroot(2) to change the root file-system to an empty directory so that the program cannot scribble into the root file-system.

We'll cover the main open source operating systems with sandbox tools: Linux, OpenBSD, and FreeBSD(including DragonFlyBSD). For in-house systems, I mined the FreeBSD and OpenBSD git repositories (specifically usr.bin and usr.sbin) for sandbox invocations, then looked up the earliest entry for a contributor. For a scientific treatment of the subject, read Sandboxing Adoption in Open Source Ecosystems, Maysara Alhindi and Joseph Hallett, SESoS 2024.

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