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Show HN: Zerobox – Sandbox any command with file, network, credential controls

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Re: Show HN: Zerobox – Sandbox any command with file, network, credential controls

#71
> zerobox --secret OPENAI_API_KEY=$OPENAI_API_KEY

Linux by default allows all users to read CLI arguments of running processes. While it looks like your bwrap invocation prevents the sandbox from looking at this process (--unshare-pid), any other process running on your system can read the secret.

Re: Show HN: Zerobox – Sandbox any command with file, network, credential controls

#73
post #5

Very interesting. I just started researching this topic yesterday to build something for adjacent use cases (sandboxing LLM authored programs). My initial prototype is using a wasm based sandbox, but I want something more robust and flexible. Some of my use cases are very latency sensitive. What sort of overhead are you seeing?

Here is the video, running Claude with Zerobox, you can see the latency, etc. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xzsGsSsx0OI

Re: Show HN: Zerobox – Sandbox any command with file, network, credential controls

#74

> zerobox --secret OPENAI_API_KEY=$OPENAI_API_KEY Linux by default allows all users to read CLI arguments of running processes. While it looks like your bwrap invocation prevents the sandbox from looking at this process (--unshare-pid), any other process running on your system can read the secret.

That's true and the expected behaviour but I see your point. The example there is not great, I should've used `sk_s123...` to show that you are passing the env var to the sandbox as opposed to setting it on the host, then proxying it. I will update it.

Re: Show HN: Zerobox – Sandbox any command with file, network, credential controls

#75
post #6
post #3

Cool project, and I think there would be a lot of value in just logging all operations.

For just logging would it really give any more info than a trace already does?

*strace that is - annoyingly it seems it was autocorrected away

Re: Show HN: Zerobox – Sandbox any command with file, network, credential controls

#77
post #75
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For just logging would it really give any more info than a trace already does?

*strace that is - annoyingly it seems it was autocorrected away

I think there is still a valid case for sandbox logs/otel. strace would give you the syscalls/traces but not _why_ a particular call was blocked in side the sandbox (e.g. the decision making bit).

Re: Show HN: Zerobox – Sandbox any command with file, network, credential controls

#79
post #51
post #5

Very interesting. I just started researching this topic yesterday to build something for adjacent use cases (sandboxing LLM authored programs). My initial prototype is using a wasm based sandbox, but I want something more robust and flexible. Some of my use cases are very latency sensitive. What sort of overhead are you seeing?

Wasm sandboxes are fast for pure compute but get painful the moment LLM code needs filesystem access or subprocess spawning. And it will, constantly. Containers with seccomp filters give you near-native speed and way broader syscall support — overhead is basically startup time (~2s cold, sub-second warm). For anything IO-heavy it's not even close. We're doing throwaway containers at https://cyqle.in if anyone's curio…

I will run the same benchmark test on wasm sandboxes just to be able to compare it with Zerobox. I will share the results tomorrow.
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