Developing in container environments with limited access might help, but I think there's a performance hit for heavy processing/ML training unless you use privileged mode which kinda defeats the purpose.
I don't do any heavy computations except for running test suites of various kinds, and these seem to perform the same on raw hardware as they do in the Kernel-based VMs.
Also a Little Snitch-like host-based firewall, which would request explicit permission to connect.
With such container, we can catch the compromised supply-chain attach easily, right?
Does anyone know such container exist?
But, say you had such a container, there’s an important distinction between “you captured a log showing the smoking gun evidence of the supply chain attack”, and “you successfully picked that log out of all of the log data you generated and classified it with high confidence as an attack”.
Speaking from experience, the second problem is the hard problem for a multitude of reasons. So while you would have the data, you’d probably have trouble getting good precision/recall on when to actually sound the alarms vs. when it’s some SRE who needed to troubleshoot some network connectivity issues.
The suspect application doesn't need the privileges, so I'm not sure how much of a problem that is?
> there’s an important distinction between “you captured a log showing the smoking gun evidence of the supply chain attack”, and “you successfully picked that log out of all of the log data you generated and classified it with high confidence as an attack”.
Assuming that you're talking about the signal:noise problem, that's hard in the general case but I feel like you could easily pick off really obvious cases like trying to access private SSH/GPG keys and still get a lot of value.
Probably. I’d agree that it’s worth trying at the very least. I’ve run into enough “should be easy” cases that turn out to be not that easy that my default is to get the data and see if the hypothesis really pans out.
1. https://github.com/ossillate-inc/packj
It DOES NOT require a VM/Container; uses strace. It shows you a preview of file system changes that installation will make and can also block arbitrary network communication during installation (uses an allow-list).
Generally a VM jail is preferable - firecracker or cloud-hypervisor(virtiofs & gpu passthrough) recommended.
A proper namespace jail (eg. bwrap) is sufficient for 99.9% of cases. To break out of a properly configured namespace jail you would need to sacrifice a 0day.
This is an oversimplification, there may be other protocols that are passed through or utilized, they would add to the surface.