R untime isolation and sandboxed environments are central to modern application security, but the most commonly used ones may not be as secure as we hope. Overview The general idea of isolated or sandboxed environments is to give a program a limited scope in which to operate. Instead of allowing a given program to use any of a machine’s resources, physical or virtual, you restrict its environment such that it can only access aspects of the system that the sandbox designer has decided are available for use by the program. This is not unlike putting your child in a literal sandbox with high walls – they are free to do whatever they want with all the sand, toys, and tools inside, but cannot interact with the environment outside. Isolation principles are in play at pretty much every aspect of modern computing. For example, last week a classmate wrote a blog on WannaCry, an exploit in Windows SMB older and unpatched versions of Windows. Without going into the detail...
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