Maybe you shouldn't install new software for a bit

Code is cheap and is becoming cheaper by the day. We need new paradigms.

Infecting sudo just makes for a quick demo.

If your container has different processes at different user ids, the exploit would still be effective.

It would likely also be able to “modify” read only files mapped from the host.

We should have:

- OS level capabilities. Launched programs get passed a capability token from the shell (or wherever you launched the program from). All syscalls take a capability as the first argument. So, "open path /foo" becomes open(cap, "/foo"). The capability could correspond to a fake filesystem, real branch of your filesystem, network filesystem or really anything. The program doesn't get to know what kind of sandbox it lives inside.

- Library / language capabilities. When I pull in some 3rd party library - like an npm module - that library should also be passed a capability too, either at import time or per callsite. It shouldn't have read/write access to all other bytes in my program's address space. It shouldn't have access to do anything on my computer as if it were me! The question is: "What is the blast radius of this code?" If the library you're using is malicious or vulnerable, we need to have sane defaults for how much damage can be caused. Calling lib::add(1, 2) shouldn't be able to result in a persistent compromise of my entire computer.

SeL4 has fast, efficient OS level capabilities. Its had them for years. They work great. They're fast - faster than linux in many cases. And tremendously useful. They allow for transparent sandboxing, userland drivers, IPC, security improvements, and more. You can even run linux as a process in sel4. I want an OS that has all the features of my linux desktop, but works like SeL4.

Unfortunately, I don't think any programming language has the kind of language level capabilities I want. Rust is really close. We need a way to restrict a 3rd party crate from calling any unsafe code (including from untrusted dependencies). We need to fix the long standing soundness bugs in rust. And we need a capability based standard library. No more global open() / listen() / etc. Only openat(), and equivalents for all other parts of the OS.

If LLMs keep getting better, I'm going to get an LLM to build all this stuff in a few years if nobody else does it first. Security on modern desktop operating systems is a joke.