Re: [ANN] New project: Safe Lua

[Mateusz Czaplinski <czapkofan@...>]

On Wed, Aug 3, 2011 at 2:53 AM, Josh Simmons <simmons.44@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Wed, Aug 3, 2011 at 4:30 AM, Stefan Reich
> <stefan.reich.maker.of.eye@googlemail.com> wrote:
>> Here's the project homepage: http://safelua.sf.net
>
> I'm not super sure what exactly you're going for here, Lua already is
> very easy to sandbox completely

Umm... I'm not so sure about it... when I look at
http://lua-users.org/wiki/SandBoxes and the amount of question marks
and "not guaranteed" disclaimers on the page.
Among others, bytecode is a known non-obvious vector of attack.

> the issue is providing "safe" APIs
> that provide enough power to be useful.

What about infinite loops and eating all memory?

> If these kind of things are your goals then existing projects already
> provide similar but more powerful control over these issues, things
> like Linux cgroups and Chrome's NaCL.

Yeah, initially I thought the OP was doing some interesting scientific
research and wanted to publish it, but then I realized it's a project
claiming a lot ("super-duper extra safe!") but I totally don't trust
it. Zero proofs, zero references, no protection against malicious
bytecode if I see correctly (thus, absolutely not safe), and author
seems to skim over the "making minimal sandbox" step as if it was
trivial. <shudders>

/M.