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Re:Show HN: Clawk – Give coding agents a disposable Linux VM... by matheusmoreira on Monday July 13, 2026 @10:57AM (#48893725)
You're missing the fact you'd be sharing a kernel with the sandboxed agent. Virtualization presents an infinitely smaller attack surface.
Re:Show HN: Clawk – Give coding agents a disposable Linux VM... by zzril on Monday July 13, 2026 @11:11AM (#48893943)
If your threat model is that of a malicious agent that will use a 0-day LPE to get root and exfiltrate all of your SSH keys, virtualization makes sense. But then, I wouldn't run such an agent at all, if not specifically in the context of malware analysis.

If you're just concerned about "agent messing up and taking the rules in some markdown files more laxly than I would have", then running it as a seperate user is totally enough...

Re:Show HN: Clawk – Give coding agents a disposable Linux VM... by matheusmoreira on Monday July 13, 2026 @11:14AM (#48893977)
Threat model is supply chain attacks on unmaintained package repositories like npm, pip and cargo. Everything on my host comes from my Linux distribution's repositories. Everything else gets virtualized with extreme prejudice. I'll even virtualize my Steam games one of these days.
Re:Show HN: Clawk – Give coding agents a disposable Linux VM... by khuey on Monday July 13, 2026 @11:15AM (#48894002)
IMO the threat model is more letting the agent loose on issues/PRs in a public Github repo and it getting tricked into running a malicious payload.
Re:Show HN: Clawk – Give coding agents a disposable Linux VM... by vqtska on Monday July 13, 2026 @11:04AM (#48893839)
What kind of things are you even doing that the agent would try to perform a kernel exploit on you? I thought sandboxing is just to protect from the agent accidentally clearing your home directory.

Side note, just 6 days ago a Linux VM escape exploit was disclosed.

Re:Show HN: Clawk – Give coding agents a disposable Linux VM... by matheusmoreira on Monday July 13, 2026 @11:12AM (#48893956)
I'm not worried about the agent at all. The VM is there to prevent it from clobbering files on my real system.

I'm worried about supply chain attacks on npm, pip, cargo and everything else. Don't want to get compromised if I install some stupid package.

My virtdev project has essentially split my computer into two systems: my "real" trusted system with software coming directly from my Linux distribition's repositories, and the VMs for everything else.

> just 6 days ago a Linux VM escape exploit was disclosed

Well, shit. Details?

Re:Show HN: Clawk – Give coding agents a disposable Linux VM... by SoftTalker on Monday July 13, 2026 @11:51AM (#48894559)
> npm, pip, cargo and everything else

All that stuff should also go into the agent user's home directory.

Re:Show HN: Clawk – Give coding agents a disposable Linux VM... by rvz on Monday July 13, 2026 @11:41AM (#48894399)
Re:Show HN: Clawk – Give coding agents a disposable Linux VM... by matheusmoreira on Monday July 13, 2026 @12:23PM (#48894973)
Patched in Linux 7.1.3, which happens to be the exact kernel version I'm running. Update your kernels, folks.