Sandboxing: a dig into building your security pit
Introduction Sandboxes are a good idea. Whether it's improving kids’ immune systems , or isolating your apps from the rest of the system, sandboxes just make sense. Despite their obvious benefits, they are still relatively uncommon. We think this is because they are still relatively obscure for most developers and hope this post will fix that. Sandboxes? What’s that? Software sandboxes isolate a process from the rest of the system, constraining the process’ access to the parts of the system that it needs and denying access to everything else. A simple example of this would be opening a PDF in (a modern version of) Adobe Reader. Since Adobe Reader now makes use of a sandbox, the document is opened in a process running in its own constrained world so that it is isolated from the rest of the system. This limits the harm that a malicious document can cause and is one of the reasons why malicious PDFs have dropped from being the number-1 attack vector seen in the wild as more a...