An open API service indexing awesome lists of open source software.

https://github.com/coreboot/encapsulate


https://github.com/coreboot/encapsulate

Last synced: about 1 year ago
JSON representation

Awesome Lists containing this project

README

          

Encapsulate
===========

Linux utility to isolate a process and its children while providing a full environment easily.
Makes use of Linux's namespace capabilities and is thus totally unportable. It also might
require more Linux kernel options than you have enabled.

Usage
-----
`encapsulate writable-subtree|tree2|tree3|... command args...`

Isolation
---------
encapsulate:

* detaches itself (and its children) from the system's mount point table, IPC table, process ID table and network stack instance,
* mounts the current filesystem view to a temporary directory,
* marks it read-only,
* mounts the `writable-subtree`s (delimited by `|`) at its "native" location into the new directory hierarchy,
* chroots to the newly mounted root directory,
* chdirs to the current directory (but inside the chroot),
* setuids back to the current user,
* and finally calls `command` with `args`

A separate process waits for all this to finish and deletes the temporary directory afterwards.

The result is that `command` runs in a system similar to the real one with a couple of exceptions. First, only files below
`writable-subtree` are writable, everything else (including /tmp, unless that's the directory you choose) is read-only.
Second, `command` can't inspect many aspects of the system (such as currently running processes) or interact with processes
easily. Third, network is blocked, so if `command` attempts to run a spam-bot, it will fail.

Example
-------
`encapsulate /tmp|/home/foo bash`

This starts a shell with "just the same" filesystem view as normal, but with everything but /tmp and /home/foo (and their subdirectories) readonly.
The new view is mounted to a temporary directory, but that happens in a separate namespace, so this isn't visible to the host system except for an empty directory in /tmp.