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Comment by apitman | Hacker News Reader

Sandstorm was (is?) way ahead of its time. Fortunately a lot of its ideas live on (a la capnproto). My understanding is the achilles heel is the amount of effort required to integrate and update apps, since each app needs to be rather invasively modified to work with the centralized authorization framework. Also the general difficulty of managing a VPS or port forwarding. But once integrated it's really slick and secure.

The overall UX is very similar to my vision of the future of selfhosting. It should be as easy as installing an app on your phone, then going through a quick OAuth2 flow to set up a tunnel on a domain, and you're up and running.

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Is! We're not dead yet! (see my other comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36193093).

I don't think app packaging could be said to be the achilles heel -- how much work it involves depends a lot on the app (some things are very easy, others can be painful), but it is certainly not the case that Sandstorm didn't take off because packaging was too hard.

Packaging should always just be zip.

Security can just be a OTP: https://github.com/tinspin/rupy/blob/master/src/se/rupy/http...

How do you compare to Yunohost? I find the app selection of Yunohost larger and broader

Sandstorm is much more secure, that's the main difference.

One can choose something like cloudron which provides isolation via docker

docker was never meant as a security tool. Proper sandboxing needs to be done in the applications.

What would an application do that is more secure than namespaces+cgroups? Containers absolutely are a security tool (especially if you configure your capabilities and don't use PID 1), one with a security tradeoffs compared to real virtualization, sure, but you're not going to do that on a VPS.

Docker (or Podman) is just a tool that sets up some linux primitives for you. One with a track record and volume of users that'd make me trust it over things that specifically advertise themselves as "security sandboxes" (i.e. firejail, who had some extremely funny basic exploits to get root from their SUID'd binary). You can even pair containers with user namespaces now and get the fakeroot equivalent of containers.

> What would an application do that is more secure than namespaces+cgroups?

You need to understand how sandboxing work.

> Docker (or Podman) is just a tool that sets up some linux primitives for you. One with a track record

A pretty poor track record.

> You need to understand how sandboxing work.

That's pretty much my job. Can you be more concrete with what you're talking about instead of this passive agressive "you don't know what you're talking about" tone?

Flatpak and Snap are pretty much using the same primitives as containers, they just don't like using the word because of existing connotations. Mandatory access controls are neat, but nobody actually uses them unless the default doesn't disturb them or they have a compliance requirement.

> A pretty poor track record.

Modern containerd, after having been split up from Docker/Moby, has a better track record than most other sandboxing tools. I mentioned a laughably bad one that the Arch wiki and many HN users still seem to endorse.

> What would an application do that is more secure than namespaces+cgroups?

Object capabilities, which is what Sandstorm/Cap’n Proto are based on, provides much more security than Mandatory Access Control systems while also providing a much simpler method for getting there.

Sadly the literature on OCAP is fairly poor, often being either too low level or too abstract.

The tl;dr is that OCAP systems work by assuming an application has no functionality whatsoever, and then must be passed (not sandboxed but passed) functionality, either at start time, or when the application requests it.

The easiest way to understand it is imagine if instead of being able to open a file on the filesystem by path, you had to specifically be passed the file descriptor by the OS, possibly before runtime.

Another way to think about it is thinking about the OAuth2 capabilities that you can grant an application. You authorize an application to have certain capabilities, and then the client is handed back a set of API tokens or addresses. Those are the only way it can exercise those capabilities.

It's not being sandboxed, it simply doesn't have any additional way to get access.

That seems interesting and like a technically correct way to go, but also I can see nobody adopting it on a general purpose operating system and thus rendering it useless. Getting developers to use portals already is hard enough.

Thanks for actually answering the question.

Cloudron is pretty cool, and Docker containers definitely help, but there's a huge security difference between what Docker provides and what Sandstorm does. One of the biggest differences is that most plain Docker-based self-hosting platforms isolate at the app level. Sandstorm isolates individual documents, which often means Sandstorm apps are protected from their own internal flaws as well.

Also, Cloudron is not open source and you need a subscription to use it generally. This has led it to be more successful of a business venture, of course, but is a big downside for software freedom.

I'm not too familiar with either's privacy/security practices, what makes Sandstorm more secure than Yunohost?

https://sandstorm.io/how-it-works

Sandstorm implements a capability-based security model, where not only does each app run in a strong sandbox, but a new instance of the app is created for each document (or whatever the app's logical unit of data may be). Sandstorm itself enforces that each document can only be accessed by the people with whom it has been shared, regardless of any bugs that might exist in the app itself. All communications between the user's browser and the app go through a proxy implemented by Sandstorm which applies this authorization regime.

Apps cannot even talk to each other or the internet without specifically requesting access, granted by the user. The UX model for these requests is designed to flow naturally for the user, by deriving the user's intent to permit access from the action they took that caused the access to be needed. For example, say the user wants to embed a chart into a document, where the chart editor and document editor are separate apps. The user clicks some sort of "embed" button in the document editor. Now they are presented with a chooser where they can pick which thing they want to embed. If they make a choice, there is no need to separately ask the user if they want the document to have access to the chart -- of course they do. Sandstorm works by having the system implement the "picker" UI directly, so that Sandstorm knows the user made this choice, and can automatically provide the implied authorization.

All this actually makes apps easier to write since they don't have to deal with authorization and user management themselves, and as a result there are a lot of neat unique apps for Sandstorm written by various people in a short amount of time. However, the down side is that existing off-the-shelf apps that do already feature their own user management and authorization are somewhat laborious to port to Sandstorm.

Yunohost takes a more traditional model of just running each app and letting it figure out its own authorization.

"Security" really ought not going to be much of a selling point, since no one is particularly good at it these days; I'd be shocked if this thing could actually point to meaningful, as opposed to theoretical, security advantages.

Sandstorm is really good at security. I would absolutely encourage you to download a copy and try to identify an exploitable security vulnerability. As a Sandstorm user, I'd really like to know about it!

I suppose I'm talking about marginal differences. As in, I'd be surprised if Sandstorm can strongly outdo, e.g. my own Docker + Nginx proxy manager+SSL stuff?

You will be surprised then. Sandstorm utilizes capability-based security to grant access to applications, each app is only ever running when an authorized user attempts to launch the app, and each document within a given app is isolated to it's own only-run-on-demand container.

The core difference here is that for all intents and purposes app vulnerabilities are almost wholly mitigated. The only significant type of app vulnerability which Sandstorm cannot prevent is privilege escalation within a single document, where you've shared limit access of a document with a user, say read only, and due to an app vulnerability, they've figured out how to edit it.

Since all documents are private solely to the user who created them initially, and the process isn't even running until that particular user tries to open it, there's effectively no attack surface for Sandstorm apps most of the time. When they are spawned, they're spun up at randomly-generated ethereal subdomains, and authorized solely for access by the web browser that launched them.

But again, "meaningful?" These threats seem mostly imaginary. This feels like a bunch of hardcore locks and keys between the rooms inside my house.

I understand where you're coming from, and I would encourage you to get familiar with object capabilities, as it is one of those big pieces of hitherto-ignored low-hanging fruit.

Packaging existing apps tends to be extra work, since you have to retrofit things (like user accounts). But creating brand new apps can actually be less work, because it has things built in (like user accounts).

“Was”, what’s left of sandstorm anymore besides a couple weekender coders whose $dayjob is at cloudflare these days? Doubt CF has anything like 10%/20% time like GOOG.

Sandstorm the business was shut down 6 years ago https://sandstorm.io/news/2017-02-06-sandstorm-returning-to-...

And Sandstorm Oasis the hosting service was shut down almost 4 years ago https://sandstorm.io/news/2019-09-15-shutting-down-oasis

This codebase is basically abandonware at this point and can’t be trusted for anything serious these days. If CF brought this on as an official product (and renamed it), it would go a long ways to build back trust

FWIW, the most-active Sandstorm developers over the past couple of years, such as zenhack (to whom you replied) and ocdtrekkie, are not Cloudflare employees, and never were. (They were never Sandstorm employees either.)

For my part, I am indeed mostly focused on Cloudflare Workers today and don't have much leftover energy to spend on Sandstorm. This has nothing to do with Cloudflare telling me how to spend my time. I make my own choices. I still love what we were building with Sandstorm, but what can I say, Workers has been a lot more successful and so I am drawn to focus my energy there.

Note that Cloudflare has no affiliation with Sandstorm, other than employing some of the former team members. Cloudflare did not acquire Sandstorm itself.

One problem with Sandstorm is that it didn't have something like miniflare. (Cloudflare didn't either until recently, and that's fixed now, but the value prop was high enough otherwise that this wasn't fatal.)

Another is that it lacked (and still does, from what I can see) a killer app. It had the perfect conditions last year with the Twitter acquisition, but to my knowledge didn't seize upon it. (Likewise, Cloudflare had a similar opportunity, but the Wildebeest project comes off as a celebration of Cloudflare's infrastructure for the sake of it and/or aimed at those who love devops stack complexity, generally—a fairly tonedeaf response to what would drive someone to want to run their own fediverse node that's not backed by Mastodon.)

The weird URLs—or rather: the constraints that led to them, and the downstream consequences to UX—didn't help.

This comment confuses me: Sandstorm itself is entirely local, and the vagrant-spk dev tool assembles local Sandstorm dev instances in virtual environments with three commands. I'm not sure what "thing like miniflare" we are missing!

As far as the killer app, Sandstorm has some really awesome Sandstorm-only apps, but probably not enough yet for our "exclusives" to be a draw to the platform on their own. Sandstorm currently has some limitations that make it difficult to use in federated environments, and we are working on it, but yeah, it meant we didn't have a fantastic story for social during all this Elon stuff.

> This comment confuses me: Sandstorm itself is entirely local

The hosted version wasn't. Having to prop up your own Sandstorm instance pretty much compromises the project goal—ease of app installability means little gains when you're still responsible for running Sandstorm infrastructure that it relies upon.

I share ocdtrekkie's confusion here.

Your original complaint was the lack of a "miniflare", i.e. a simulator for local development purposes. But you can run Sandstorm itself locally and there are in fact tools to streamline the process of doing app development using a local Sandstorm server.

Now you seem to be arguing something about how running Sandstorm locally is too much work for end users, who would prefer to use the hosted version? But I thought we were talking about app developers. End users don't need a "miniflare".

Please reply indicating whether you agree or disagree with the following statement:

"The Cloudflare developer experience with miniflare is worse than that of Sandstorm."

The experience configuring sendmail is worse than configuring icewm if you want to play audio files.

If what you're looking for here is someone to confirm that your crummy false equivalence is crummy and false, then that's doable. (Say the word if so.)

The Go implementation of capnp is alive and well, too. I highly recommend it: https://github.com/capnproto/go-capnp

I think the answer is that packaging apps for Sandstorm is a bad hack, as ripping out the auth system and design granularity is all hard for an existing application. The best Sandstorm apps are written for Sandstorm, and in those cases, the granularity and built-in authentication make it way easier to write an app. I wrote a Sandstorm-native app in less than an hour.

But if you built your entire application assuming you're shipping it via Docker, untangling the sheer amount of redundant garbage you need to pare down to a single-document app that accepts outside authentication and security, ends up being a ton of work to package and then maintain it long-term.

Ideally, I think having apps not made for Sandstorm originally is mostly just a strategy to get enough people operating on Sandstorm's model for people to build Sandstorm-specific apps in earnest.

I think making apps that have a very clean separation between external security code (e.g. "the claims in the JWT") and internal security code (e.g. "the app's own internal understanding of security, regardless of provider") is always a fantastic idea.

Why not just make it be a docker launcher instead?

Then it would be as poor of a user experience and have as many security problems as one of the literally dozens of self-hosting tools that are just Docker launchers.

Can you share links to the major ones (I'm aware of a couple like yunohost and cloudron)? What are the most important UX issues in your opinion? Disclaimer: I'm working on a docker launcher for selfhosting and want to solve some of the current problems.

Umbrel is another relatively popular one, particularly with the crypto space.

The biggest thing is the lack of integration. Some of them have patchy SSO integration options, but most won't tamper with the app in any meaningful way, so even if you have login integration, you have to log into each app on a server, and each app is subject to that app's capabilities for things like sharing.

You end up hosting a bunch of disjointed and separate services. Sandstorm feels much more like hosting Google Docs and it's barely ever used support for third party apps/document types.

Sandstorm requires aggressive app packaging work but the payoff is significant: Apps do not have independent authentication at all, logging into Sandstorm gets you into all of your applications, and every file can be shared using the same process with other users or the public trivially.

In fact, because we break apps into "grains" or documents, we can do crazy things like allow you create Collections which comprise of documents made with different applications and then share that as a single unit with others. So I can take a couple specific Etherpad documents, a Wekan board, and a WordPress, put them into a project collection, and then share that with a collaborator with one link.

> Umbrel is another relatively popular one, particularly with the crypto space.

Impressive that Umbrel's popular because IIRC it doesn't take security as seriously as say Sandstrom. You'd think the crypto folks would at least care about that, if nothing else?

Umbrel pivoted. When it launched it actually was a Bitcoin miner, and then they added other apps, and then made the Bitcoin miner optional. And yeah, I don't know the details about the internals but a friend of mine was not thrilled with their approach. I think one specific point was that they don't support using HTTPS on the local network at all.

I wrote a blog post answering that: https://sandstorm.io/news/2014-08-19-why-not-run-docker-apps

Oof... 9 years ago.

The issue for me with Sandstorm is that it's great until some service/app you need is missing or broken, and then you're back to manual self hosting. I always find that self hosting even one app is the pain, self-hosting more isn't that bad (once you have your box setup).

I have tried for a client who wanted to install open source app in server with sandstorm about 3 or 4 years ago, it is just very slow at the time. Hope they improved that since.

Check out fractalnetworks.co if you are looking for something similar that is still under active (commercial) development.

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