CloudABI - Ed Schouten - LCa2016

Ed Schouten provided a detailed tour of Capsicum and CloudABI.

• AppArmor is an after thought
• Puts the burden back on users
• Not linked to security policies.
• Capsicum is a FreeBSD method that sandboxes software
• Works well with small applications but doesn't scale.
• Questions why UNIX can't run third party binaries safely.

What is CloudABI?

• CloudABI is a POSIX-like runtime environment based on Capsicum.
• Capability based security with less foot shooting.
• Global namespaces are entirely absent
  • By default can only perform actions with no global impact.
• Symbiosis, not assimilation as it can run side by side with traditional applications.
• File descriptors are used to provide additional rights.
• Provided an example of using CloudABI to provide a secure web service.
• You can use wrappers to provide features missing from CloudABI.
• Only has 58 system calls. Incredibly compact.
• Working towards having support for more POSIX operating systems.
• Allows reuse of binaries without compilation.

Conclusions:

• Provided an example of a simple CloudABI ls program.
• How to execute it via the shell
• Feels there's scalability problems with CloudABI.
• Wrote cloudabi-run to make it feel less clunky to run.
• Replace CLI arguments with a YAML file.
• Easy to configure.
• Impossible to invoke programs with the wrong file
• Reduces start-up complexity.
• Gave an example of CloudABI as the basis of a cluster management suite.
• Provides a 100% accurate dependency graph.
• Gave an example of "CloudABI as a Service".