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6.18.12 Sandboxed Evaluation

Sometimes you would like to evaluate code that comes from an untrusted party. The safest way to do this is to buy a new computer, evaluate the code on that computer, then throw the machine away. However if you are unwilling to take this simple approach, Guile does include a limited “sandbox” facility that can allow untrusted code to be evaluated with some confidence.

To use the sandboxed evaluator, load its module:

(use-modules (ice-9 sandbox))

Guile’s sandboxing facility starts with the ability to restrict the time and space used by a piece of code.

Scheme Procedure: call-with-time-limit limit thunk limit-reached

Call thunk, but cancel it if limit seconds of wall-clock time have elapsed. If the computation is cancelled, call limit-reached in tail position. thunk must not disable interrupts or prevent an abort via a dynamic-wind unwind handler.

Scheme Procedure: call-with-allocation-limit limit thunk limit-reached

Call thunk, but cancel it if limit bytes have been allocated. If the computation is cancelled, call limit-reached in tail position. thunk must not disable interrupts or prevent an abort via a dynamic-wind unwind handler.

This limit applies to both stack and heap allocation. The computation will not be aborted before limit bytes have been allocated, but for the heap allocation limit, the check may be postponed until the next garbage collection.

Note that as a current shortcoming, the heap size limit applies to all threads; concurrent allocation by other unrelated threads counts towards the allocation limit.

Scheme Procedure: call-with-time-and-allocation-limits time-limit allocation-limit thunk

Invoke thunk in a dynamic extent in which its execution is limited to time-limit seconds of wall-clock time, and its allocation to allocation-limit bytes. thunk must not disable interrupts or prevent an abort via a dynamic-wind unwind handler.

If successful, return all values produced by invoking thunk. Any uncaught exception thrown by the thunk will propagate out. If the time or allocation limit is exceeded, an exception will be thrown to the limit-exceeded key.

The time limit and stack limit are both very precise, but the heap limit only gets checked asynchronously, after a garbage collection. In particular, if the heap is already very large, the number of allocated bytes between garbage collections will be large, and therefore the precision of the check is reduced.

Additionally, due to the mechanism used by the allocation limit (the after-gc-hook), large single allocations like (make-vector #e1e7) are only detected after the allocation completes, even if the allocation itself causes garbage collection. It’s possible therefore for user code to not only exceed the allocation limit set, but also to exhaust all available memory, causing out-of-memory conditions at any allocation site. Failure to allocate memory in Guile itself should be safe and cause an exception to be thrown, but most systems are not designed to handle malloc failures. An allocation failure may therefore exercise unexpected code paths in your system, so it is a weakness of the sandbox (and therefore an interesting point of attack).

The main sandbox interface is eval-in-sandbox.

Scheme Procedure: eval-in-sandbox exp [#:time-limit 0.1] [#:allocation-limit #e10e6] [#:bindings all-pure-bindings] [#:module (make-sandbox-module bindings)] [#:sever-module? #t]

Evaluate the Scheme expression exp within an isolated "sandbox". Limit its execution to time-limit seconds of wall-clock time, and limit its allocation to allocation-limit bytes.

The evaluation will occur in module, which defaults to the result of calling make-sandbox-module on bindings, which itself defaults to all-pure-bindings. This is the core of the sandbox: creating a scope for the expression that is safe.

A safe sandbox module has two characteristics. Firstly, it will not allow the expression being evaluated to avoid being cancelled due to time or allocation limits. This ensures that the expression terminates in a timely fashion.

Secondly, a safe sandbox module will prevent the evaluation from receiving information from previous evaluations, or from affecting future evaluations. All combinations of binding sets exported by (ice-9 sandbox) form safe sandbox modules.

The bindings should be given as a list of import sets. One import set is a list whose car names an interface, like (ice-9 q), and whose cdr is a list of imports. An import is either a bare symbol or a pair of (out . in), where out and in are both symbols and denote the name under which a binding is exported from the module, and the name under which to make the binding available, respectively. Note that bindings is only used as an input to the default initializer for the module argument; if you pass #:module, bindings is unused. If sever-module? is true (the default), the module will be unlinked from the global module tree after the evaluation returns, to allow mod to be garbage-collected.

If successful, return all values produced by exp. Any uncaught exception thrown by the expression will propagate out. If the time or allocation limit is exceeded, an exception will be thrown to the limit-exceeded key.

Constructing a safe sandbox module is tricky in general. Guile defines an easy way to construct safe modules from predefined sets of bindings. Before getting to that interface, here are some general notes on safety.

  1. The time and allocation limits rely on the ability to interrupt and cancel a computation. For this reason, no binding included in a sandbox module should be able to indefinitely postpone interrupt handling, nor should a binding be able to prevent an abort. In practice this second consideration means that dynamic-wind should not be included in any binding set.
  2. The time and allocation limits apply only to the eval-in-sandbox call. If the call returns a procedure which is later called, no limit is “automatically” in place. Users of eval-in-sandbox have to be very careful to reimpose limits when calling procedures that escape from sandboxes.
  3. Similarly, the dynamic environment of the eval-in-sandbox call is not necessarily in place when any procedure that escapes from the sandbox is later called.

    This detail prevents us from exposing primitive-eval to the sandbox, for two reasons. The first is that it’s possible for legacy code to forge references to any binding, if the allow-legacy-syntax-objects? parameter is true. The default for this parameter is true; see Syntax Transformer Helpers for the details. The parameter is bound to #f for the duration of the eval-in-sandbox call itself, but that will not be in place during calls to escaped procedures.

    The second reason we don’t expose primitive-eval is that primitive-eval implicitly works in the current module, which for an escaped procedure will probably be different than the module that is current for the eval-in-sandbox call itself.

    The common denominator here is that if an interface exposed to the sandbox relies on dynamic environments, it is easy to mistakenly grant the sandboxed procedure additional capabilities in the form of bindings that it should not have access to. For this reason, the default sets of predefined bindings do not depend on any dynamically scoped value.

  4. Mutation may allow a sandboxed evaluation to break some invariant in users of data supplied to it. A lot of code culturally doesn’t expect mutation, but if you hand mutable data to a sandboxed evaluation and you also grant mutating capabilities to that evaluation, then the sandboxed code may indeed mutate that data. The default set of bindings to the sandbox do not include any mutating primitives.

    Relatedly, set! may allow a sandbox to mutate a primitive, invalidating many system-wide invariants. Guile is currently quite permissive when it comes to imported bindings and mutability. Although set! to a module-local or lexically bound variable would be fine, we don’t currently have an easy way to disallow set! to an imported binding, so currently no binding set includes set!.

  5. Mutation may allow a sandboxed evaluation to keep state, or make a communication mechanism with other code. On the one hand this sounds cool, but on the other hand maybe this is part of your threat model. Again, the default set of bindings doesn’t include mutating primitives, preventing sandboxed evaluations from keeping state.
  6. The sandbox should probably not be able to open a network connection, or write to a file, or open a file from disk. The default binding set includes no interaction with the operating system.

If you, dear reader, find the above discussion interesting, you will enjoy Jonathan Rees’ dissertation, “A Security Kernel Based on the Lambda Calculus”.

Scheme Variable: all-pure-bindings

All “pure” bindings that together form a safe subset of those bindings available by default to Guile user code.

Scheme Variable: all-pure-and-impure-bindings

Like all-pure-bindings, but additionally including mutating primitives like vector-set!. This set is still safe in the sense mentioned above, with the caveats about mutation.

The components of these composite sets are as follows:

Scheme Variable: alist-bindings
Scheme Variable: array-bindings
Scheme Variable: bit-bindings
Scheme Variable: bitvector-bindings
Scheme Variable: char-bindings
Scheme Variable: char-set-bindings
Scheme Variable: clock-bindings
Scheme Variable: core-bindings
Scheme Variable: error-bindings
Scheme Variable: fluid-bindings
Scheme Variable: hash-bindings
Scheme Variable: iteration-bindings
Scheme Variable: keyword-bindings
Scheme Variable: list-bindings
Scheme Variable: macro-bindings
Scheme Variable: nil-bindings
Scheme Variable: number-bindings
Scheme Variable: pair-bindings
Scheme Variable: predicate-bindings
Scheme Variable: procedure-bindings
Scheme Variable: promise-bindings
Scheme Variable: prompt-bindings
Scheme Variable: regexp-bindings
Scheme Variable: sort-bindings
Scheme Variable: srfi-4-bindings
Scheme Variable: string-bindings
Scheme Variable: symbol-bindings
Scheme Variable: unspecified-bindings
Scheme Variable: variable-bindings
Scheme Variable: vector-bindings
Scheme Variable: version-bindings

The components of all-pure-bindings.

Scheme Variable: mutating-alist-bindings
Scheme Variable: mutating-array-bindings
Scheme Variable: mutating-bitvector-bindings
Scheme Variable: mutating-fluid-bindings
Scheme Variable: mutating-hash-bindings
Scheme Variable: mutating-list-bindings
Scheme Variable: mutating-pair-bindings
Scheme Variable: mutating-sort-bindings
Scheme Variable: mutating-srfi-4-bindings
Scheme Variable: mutating-string-bindings
Scheme Variable: mutating-variable-bindings
Scheme Variable: mutating-vector-bindings

The additional components of all-pure-and-impure-bindings.

Finally, what do you do with a binding set? What is a binding set anyway? make-sandbox-module is here for you.

Scheme Procedure: make-sandbox-module bindings

Return a fresh module that only contains bindings.

The bindings should be given as a list of import sets. One import set is a list whose car names an interface, like (ice-9 q), and whose cdr is a list of imports. An import is either a bare symbol or a pair of (out . in), where out and in are both symbols and denote the name under which a binding is exported from the module, and the name under which to make the binding available, respectively.

So you see that binding sets are just lists, and all-pure-and-impure-bindings is really just the result of appending all of the component binding sets.


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