What is happening in the first screenshot under "Command approvals and prompt fatigue"?
Why is "Allow Once" completely red, "Always allow" is black and "Deny" is muted red? Isn't the order of safety (descending) "Deny", "Allow Once" and "Always Allow"?
I run a home-grown 'Agent' by just making a local user on my linux box. I treat it like an untrusted local user, I only give it scoped API keys, and manage permissions just like any other thing. I have a NixOS machine and I have the Agent setup to just use home-manager to manage itself and its timers and deps and stuff inside its own config.
It would be insane to run a full fledged Agent from your own accounts, with the same access as yourself. At the same time running it fully scoped inside a container/VM seemed a little bit too heavy handed to me and the Agent-as-user seems like a better fit for me right now. (I did run my coding agents inside a microVM for a while but ran into a few too many annoyances)
I know it's probably against the guidelines to comment on it, but any chance you could ask whatever agent is responsible to remove the scroll highjacking? It makes it incredibly tedious to read this article.
Isn't a lot of this what containerization was supposed to solve? Why are they reimplementing file system isolation from scratch when jails and chroots exist? Why do they have to reason about arbitrary HTTP requests when firewalls and content filtering exist?
And it sounds like the proxy can be easily circumvented by the agent, since it only applies within the Node process and the agent can execute arbitrary external commands.
(The filesystem wrapper API sounds even more pointless. The risk it protects against seems insignificant compared to the other risks associated with their system.)
People are running these as a program under their admin permissions, right? That seems to be the root problem to me. Start with having it run under its own user and you could use firewalls and permissions and keep it siloed to some Home directory or etc that you just copy files to?
Namespaces and cgroups allow for resource accounting and limited isolation between trusted processes. It is only through hard work and luck that they have been usable in the k8s/docker world.
To be 100% clear, namespaces are not a security feature in themselves, but can be used to run processes with reduced privileges and improved isolation, but not for untrusted code.
A few reasons.
1) Kernel features explicitly need to support namespaces, and only the portions that support namespaces have increased isolation, any syscall, socket family, etc… can provide an attack vector for the global kernel.
2) The methods to further constrain processes like LSMs, SecComp, eBPF system calling typically are not implemented by common container images and are difficult for users to develop and deploy.
3) User namespaces have actually increased exposure to user data, if protecting the system itself because of the proliferation of capabilities(7)[0]. Capabilities were designed as a vertical slice of superior(root) user functionality, and the contract is much different than people expect[1][2] We will have to see where things go, but as far as untrusted code, no containers/namespaces/etc… are not sufficient at all. There are just too many holes in the shared kernel and several socket() based backends that are used through netlink etc… Here you can see just how insane the number of default capabilities are granted to every user right now.
What is happening in the first screenshot under "Command approvals and prompt fatigue"?
Why is "Allow Once" completely red, "Always allow" is black and "Deny" is muted red? Isn't the order of safety (descending) "Deny", "Allow Once" and "Always Allow"?
I run a home-grown 'Agent' by just making a local user on my linux box. I treat it like an untrusted local user, I only give it scoped API keys, and manage permissions just like any other thing. I have a NixOS machine and I have the Agent setup to just use home-manager to manage itself and its timers and deps and stuff inside its own config.
It would be insane to run a full fledged Agent from your own accounts, with the same access as yourself. At the same time running it fully scoped inside a container/VM seemed a little bit too heavy handed to me and the Agent-as-user seems like a better fit for me right now. (I did run my coding agents inside a microVM for a while but ran into a few too many annoyances)
I know it's probably against the guidelines to comment on it, but any chance you could ask whatever agent is responsible to remove the scroll highjacking? It makes it incredibly tedious to read this article.
Isn't a lot of this what containerization was supposed to solve? Why are they reimplementing file system isolation from scratch when jails and chroots exist? Why do they have to reason about arbitrary HTTP requests when firewalls and content filtering exist?
Because they don't know what they are doing.
In any case, a proxy makes sense, just not for the reasons they give.
And it sounds like the proxy can be easily circumvented by the agent, since it only applies within the Node process and the agent can execute arbitrary external commands.
(The filesystem wrapper API sounds even more pointless. The risk it protects against seems insignificant compared to the other risks associated with their system.)
People are running these as a program under their admin permissions, right? That seems to be the root problem to me. Start with having it run under its own user and you could use firewalls and permissions and keep it siloed to some Home directory or etc that you just copy files to?
The people building this aren't good at engineering reliable systems, as evidenced by the incredibly wasteful core premise of what they're doing.
The answer is that they probably aren't aware of all these things.
Namespaces and cgroups allow for resource accounting and limited isolation between trusted processes. It is only through hard work and luck that they have been usable in the k8s/docker world.
To be 100% clear, namespaces are not a security feature in themselves, but can be used to run processes with reduced privileges and improved isolation, but not for untrusted code.
A few reasons.
1) Kernel features explicitly need to support namespaces, and only the portions that support namespaces have increased isolation, any syscall, socket family, etc… can provide an attack vector for the global kernel.
2) The methods to further constrain processes like LSMs, SecComp, eBPF system calling typically are not implemented by common container images and are difficult for users to develop and deploy.
3) User namespaces have actually increased exposure to user data, if protecting the system itself because of the proliferation of capabilities(7)[0]. Capabilities were designed as a vertical slice of superior(root) user functionality, and the contract is much different than people expect[1][2] We will have to see where things go, but as far as untrusted code, no containers/namespaces/etc… are not sufficient at all. There are just too many holes in the shared kernel and several socket() based backends that are used through netlink etc… Here you can see just how insane the number of default capabilities are granted to every user right now.
[0] https://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man7/capabilities.7.html [1] https://elixir.bootlin.com/linux/v7.0.1/source/kernel/capabi... [2] https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/admin-guide/namespace...