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Comment by lxgr | Hacker News Reader

This applies to both containers and container machines though, right?

Containers (those popularised on Linux by Docker) are built on Linux primitives like cgroups and namespaces, so they're running directly on the same kernel, same VFS, often the same FS, etc. Their isolation properties rely on (a) all those Linux features working as expected, and (b) the container runtime setting them up properly.

Depending on your threat model, that's fine, but a lot of people (including me) will say that containers are not a security mechanism.

But macOS requires[1] virtualisation for containers anyway; the security is just a bonus.

[1] at least for a real Linux kernel...

The surface of an OS is definitely larger than that of many hypervisors, which is e.g. why browsers often provide their own much narrower sandbox.

On the other hand, in other scenarios, people trust the security boundaries of their working as expected all the time, no? This is the basis of e.g. Android app isolation (every app runs under its own Linux UID/GID), and true multi-user Unix systems trusting the OS's security boundaries to hold have decades of history.

Different threat models. Your typical Android device (and Linux server for that matter, at home or at scale) is not usually running security-sensitive general workloads for multiple tenants in the same OS instance. :-)

I don't think that's right. The threat model for Android for example could well be a malicious third party leveraging a vulnerable app to gain access to your banking app on the same device. There's definitely (meant to be) a security boundary between apps.

These are all security boundaries of a kind, some more effective than others, balancing priorities according to threat model. Running every app on your phone in a hardware virtual machine would be... an expensive choice.

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