Topics / trust boundary design

Attributed viewpoint

Existing isolation uses an outdated unit of trust

Johnston says technologies such as gVisor and Firecracker isolate the platform from users and users from one another. She calls that unit of trust outdated and asks how to protect users from their “own” code.

Behind the viewpoint

Translations are for reading; original excerpts remain the evidence.

Sidecars: A low-latency trust boundary for Sandboxes | Modal Blog

Original excerpt

technologies like gVisor and Firecracker “solved” “isolation” nearly eight years ago. Unfortunately for us, they solved it for an now-outdated unit of trust. How do you protect users from their “own” code?
Context

At Modal, our customers rely on Sandboxes to execute untrusted code written by their downstream users or, almost exclusively now, by agents. Running untrusted code isn’t a new problem: every cloud provider has to do this from day 1 to isolate their platform from their user and their users from each other. Fortunately,