MXC - a sandboxed code execution system

chneu

Right you are, Ken!

minraws

Why is everyone making their own code execution agent runtime engines I have an entire project built on top of openshell already, why not first come up with a sandboxing policy design, like unix did, and then build on top of that. Currently all project do tend to agree on what and how they work but certain things being different makes porting tedius, if all of them have a bare minimum subset common amongst them it would be much easier to switch, and validate security surface area. I feel like there are more vulnerabilities in this vibe coded slop sandboxes, and it's more likely everyone one of us trusting them to build projects around them will shoot our foot off once a cve is hit in one that's common in all of them but since they are all slop copies someone will have to figure out how they apply to all others and then manually fix it properly, and if one of them makes a CVE public it will leave dozens of these runtimes open to exploits. I wish the best to my future self with regards to security I feel like we are completely screwed. Since we can no longer depend on upstream for security.

dannyw

This looks pretty decent actually. Sure, you could consider it a frontend/SDK for bubblewrap/seatbelt/processcontainer; but setting em up consistently is far from trivial; and hand rolling is a really bad idea (speaking from experience). I like the ‘learning’ mode for figuring out what perms/config a runtime needs, the MIT license, the clear optional telemetry disclosures, and somewhat light and still readable documentation. Regardless of your views on Microsoft, this looks quite useful; serves a clear purpose, and from a quick glance, looks like a high quality project even if it’s just the first version.

smitty1e

Asked Grok the difference between mxc and flatpak: "So MXC is a cross-platform “what may this workload touch?” layer aimed at agents. Flatpak is a Linux app format whose sandbox happens to share a backend with MXC on Linux."

kernc

350,000 of mostly Rust SLOC [1] ... And the upstream sandboxes aren't even vendored! I'd be way more confident building upon something I can grasp and understand. [2] [1]: https://ghloc.dev/microsoft/mxc [2]: https://github.com/sandbox-utils/sandbox-run

arj

Would this allow a sandboxed container on windows to still run commands in wsl?

pprotas

Microsoft stole my idea :) (joking obviously, everyone and their mom is making sandboxes) https://github.com/pprotas/slopbox

rfgplk

They have a sandbox escape in there. Likewise capability ordering is wrong. Exactly what you should expect from Microsoft. Since this apparently wraps bubblewrap (another incompetent action on behalf of Microslop), did a quick sweep of that codebase too. Setuid is wrong, capability dropping is wrong, bubblewrap does _not_ protect against compromised/vulnerable kernels (and it should fyi), wrote up a full bubblewrap/mxc sandbox escape too.

zenapollo

Saw the M stands for Microsoft and immediately closed the tab. 1 it’s unnecessary - communicates nothing but look-at-me branding. 2 toxic company.

neobrain

Do any of these sandboxing solutions have a dynamic component to them that lets you grant permissions, starting with a minimal sandbox and asynchronously adding permissions as they become necessary? Harnesses try to do this when accessing non-project folders, but it's not always strictly enforced and generally not revocable. Harnesses also block agent execution until a decision is made, which requires constant monitoring to ensure progress can happen when the agent could easily proceed with an alternative method right away. I like the idea of a minimal sandbox that protects against accidental `rm -rf` and against personal data leakage, but such a setup then often gets in the way of the specific task to be done. Ideally the sandbox would be able to aggregate blocked accesses and then expose them in an external TUI dashboard, where I can then enable access (without blocking any running agent on this, since that's prone to "press okay" fatigue). Does anything close to this exist yet?

mintflow

Seems aws also announced a sandbox solution I used agent over 1 year and basically always give codex full permission on each thread, do not get issue so far Why we need this layer of complexity? Or its mainly for big company that need control ?

epage

Been looking at sandboxing, both low level and higher level like this. The API for their Rust mxc-sdk looks nice but - their "sdk" has binaries and the build script has logic for them - their build scripts do windows-exclusive work on all platforms - not putting some of the backends behind features causes more build script work (and that work will break on future Cargo versions) - at least some of the remaíning build script work doesn't need to be a build script - it seems pretty dependency heavy

wild_pointer

What's also interesting is that they added the Experimental_CreateProcessInSandbox API to Windows, like, last month. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/secauthz/cre... Funny, now that it's documented, the API name will be stuck with this name forever.

eminence32

A little off topic, maybe, but I've been having great luck with wasmtime and wasm32-wasip3 for writing sandboxed plugins. The tooling is pretty nice when you write plugins in rust, but I don't know what it looks like for other languages right now. wasip3 is not stable yet, but it has a lot of nice changes (compared to wasip2) for integrating with async code

simonw

This is promising, but there's one feature that's missing that I really care about: fine-grained networking. They have this for Windows and Linux, but it's sadly missing for macOS - see the support table here: https://github.com/microsoft/mxc/blob/main/docs/backends/sea... Things macOS is missing include "Allow/deny by hostname" and "Allow/deny by IP, CIDR, port, or protocol". The rest all looks great, and if you are on Linux or Windows those restrictions don't apply. I guess this is the universal challenge of building an abstraction layer over multiple different technologies.

ranger_danger

How does this compare to Sandboxie? https://github.com/sandboxie-plus/Sandboxie

fassssst

Codex uses this on Windows now.

superxpro12

Right you are, ken! But seriously, we need docker for models like years ago. I dont want these things running with the ability to run rm -rf / its should be treated no different than wget | sh

shados

Is this playing in the same space as the like of gvisor?

plq

Both Firefox and Chromium have battle-tested cross-platform sandbox implementations, but I imagine it'd be laborious to integrate them as a third-party dependency to other projects. Why not spend resources on repackaging them in an easy-to-use SDK instead of reinventing the wheel? Microsoft is already a Chromium contributor so it's not like they lack in-house expertise or something. https://wiki.mozilla.org/Security/Sandbox https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/HEAD/docs/d...