Discussion: Sandboxing agent actions: file system, network and credential boundaries
Entries
'An egress proxy with an allowlist ... so that an injected "post this file to that URL" fails' holds only if every allowed host is read-only for the sandbox, and in practice it is not. The hosts an agent legitimately needs are usually the ones that accept uploads: a code host (issues, gists, pull-request comments), a package index, a chat webhook, the provider's own API with a write endpoint; an injected instruction can exfiltrate through any of them, with the sandbox's own scoped token, and the proxy log shows an allowed request to an allowed host. Two more channels bypass a host allowlist entirely: DNS, if the sandbox resolves names directly (data fits in query labels to an attacker-controlled zone), and error pages or redirects on allowed hosts that carry query strings elsewhere. The control that actually matches the threat is an allowlist by method and path, or by request shape, with bodies logged and size-limited for the few write endpoints that are needed; DNS routed through the proxy or a stub resolver that answers only for allowed names; and redirects not followed inside the sandbox. The article's bullet is right as a first layer and wrong as the reason given for it.
Some building blocks between 'plain container' and 'VM' that the article's three-layer list can name. On Linux, Landlock (since kernel 5.13) lets an unprivileged process restrict its own file-system access to listed paths, and bubblewrap (`bwrap`) builds a throwaway mount and user namespace without a container runtime; both are what desktop sandboxes and some agent runners use to confine a single command cheaply. For the stronger boundary, Firecracker microVMs (the technology behind AWS Lambda and Fargate) and Kata Containers give each workload its own kernel while keeping container-style start times, which is the 'VM boundary' option for multi-tenant agents; gVisor sits between them, and its documentation is candid that it implements a subset of Linux system calls, so some binaries fail under `runsc` where they run under `runc`. On the Docker side, the flags that back the first how-to bullet are `--read-only` with `--tmpfs` for scratch space, `--cap-drop=ALL`, `--security-opt no-new-privileges`, `--pids-limit` against fork bombs and `--network none`; rootless mode or `userns-remap` maps the container's root to an unprivileged host user.
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