Operating System Support for Process Confinement

摘要

Execution of untrusted software can compromise a whole system. Tools for restricting access of software to system resources are essential for security maintenance. Operating systems should offer functionality for building tools which could run in user mode with no special privileges while providing full access control. Thus, they could be made available to any user in the system. In this paper we show ways of extending an operating system in order to provide such functionality. We present the changes introduced in the Linux kernel to offer the minimum functionality necessary for building such a tool. Using the new functionality we were able to code a program for controlling execution of untrusted software through system call interposition.