"Hello, we are a serious cybersec firm and we have evaluated the code and here are our test with results that proof that we didn't find anything, the code is sound; Have we been through? We have, trust us!"
Realistically security these days is an ongoing process, not a one off, compare to cloudflare's security page: https://developers.cloudflare.com/workers/reference/security... (to be clear when I use the pronoun "we" I'm paraphrasing and not personally employed by cloudflare/part of this at all)
- Implicit/from other pieces of marketing: We're a reputably company with these other big reputable companies who care about security and are juicy targets for attacks using this product.
- We update V8 within 24 hours of a security update, compared to weeks for the big juicy target of Google Chrome.
- We use various additional sandboxing techniques on top of V8, including the complete lack of high precision timers, and various OS level sandboxing techniques.
- We detect code doing strange things and move it out of the multi-tennant environment into an isolated one just in case.
- We detect code using APIs that increase the surface area (like debuggers) and move it out of the multi-tennant environment into an isolated on just in case.
- We will keep investing in security going forwards.
Running secure multi-tenant environments is not an easy problem. It seems unlikely that it's possible for a typical open source project (typical in terms of limited staffing, usually including a complete lack of on-call staff) to release software to do so today.
We're thinking about OpenWorkers less as "self-hosted Cloudflare Workers" and more as a containment layer for code you don't fully control. V8 isolates, CPU/memory limits, no filesystem access, network via controlled bindings only.
We're also exploring execution recording - capture all I/O so you can replay and audit exactly what the code did.
Production bug -> replay -> AI fix -> verified -> deployed.
As a TinyKVM / KVM Server contributor I'm obviously hopeful our approach will work out, but we still have some way to go to get to a level of polish that makes it easy to get going with and have the confidence of production level experience.
TinyKVM has the advantage of a much smaller surface area to secure as a KVM based solution and the ability to offer fast per-request isolation as we can reset the VM state a couple of orders of magnitude faster than v8 can create a new isolate from a snapshot.
To use your example: Any cybersecurity firm or practitioner worth their salt should be *very* explicit about the scope of their assessment.
- That scope should exhaustively detail what was and wasn't tested.
- There should be proof of the work product, and an intelligible summary of why, how, and when an assessment was done.
- They should give you what you need to have confidence in *your understanding of* you security posture as well as evidence that you *have* a security posture you can prove with facts and data.
Anybody who tells you not to worry and take their word for something should be viewed with extreme skepticism. It is a completely unacceptable frame of mind when you're legally and ethically responsible for things you're stewarding for other people.