News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

samhita-alla

Supply chain attacks are a reasonable use case. But do they require VM-level isolation?

For example, what about a sandbox that isolates arbitrary user code in its own process using kernel-level primitives like user namespaces, Landlock and seccomp? That's the same class of problem Claude Code and Codex are solving when they execute model-generated commands, and it should also limit filesystem and network access as you mentioned. It's process-level isolation rather than VM-level isolation, but it still provides meaningful containment. What do you think?

My concern is that people often default to VM-level isolation without really thinking through what it's meant to protect against and whether they actually need it. It comes with a fairly heavy infra burden and isn't necessarily the right answer for every use case.

Are we defaulting to VM-level sandboxing before understanding the threat model?

Hey everyone, I'm Samhita and I work at Union.ai. We've been building infrastructure for running agents and building models, which naturally got us thinking a lot about sandboxing. One thing I've been wondering: are we overusing heavyweight sandboxing solutions?I think some form of isolation is non-negotiable when you're running model-generated code. Things like process isolation, filesystem...

( Read More... | 3 comments | 2 points | on HN )
Re:Want to get started with LLMs? Here's what you need to know on Thursday October 12, 2023 @12:52PM (#37859704)
OpenAI hasn't confirmed it yet, so as of now, there are no reliable sources to rely on for this information. I just removed that part.
Re:Want to get started with LLMs? Here's what you need to know on Thursday October 12, 2023 @12:43PM (#37859598)
We have many existing sources on LLMs. I referenced a couple of them that I find great. Repeating the same content doesn't offer much value. :)

And I wrote the entire content myself.

Re:Want to get started with LLMs? Here's what you need to know on Thursday October 12, 2023 @12:29PM (#37859414)
I wanted to talk about what powers LLMs, which I believe is important. The answer to that is transformers. While I may not have delved deeper into how a transformer actually works, I tried to explain the concepts in the simplest way possible.
Re:Show HN: Open-source, self-hosted alternative to Jira on Thursday April 20, 2023 @11:51AM (#35641963)
I prefer to use Plane as my issue management tool indefinitely, as its user interface is visually appealing and the user experience is exceptionally intuitive. Keep up the great work!
Re:Dabbling with Dagster vs. Airflow on Thursday September 15, 2022 @07:22AM (#32850105)
Have you seen https://github.com/flyteorg/flyte? It's a data, ML and infrastructure orchestrator. (btw, I'm a Flyte engineer)