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Comment by baggy_trough | Hacker News Reader

What is?

I've build a custom thumbnail/metadata extraction toolkit based on libavcodec/libavformat that runs the decoding in seccomp's strict mode and communicates the results through a linear RGB stdout stream. Works pretty well and has low overhead and complexity.

Full transcoding would be a bit more complex, but assuming decoding is done in software, I think that should also be possible.

Full virtualization. Docker implies a shared kernel attack surface, that's what you want to avoid.

Kernel level exploits are more dangerous but also way less common, for a lot of places docker is sorta okay as a security boundary

It's layers. Docker is better than nothing, but a VM is better still, and even better is docker on a dedicated VM on dedicated hardware on a dedicated network segment.

That's sacrificing an awful lot of latency cost for each transcode job though.

Each job sends a provisioning ticket to a thermal printer. 1 business day turnaround, unless we need to order more servers

Firecracker says it can start a VM in 125 ms, for most transcode jobs that seems like it'd be a trivial cost.

To make a bit of a strawman of what you are saying even better still would be an unplugged power cable as a turned off machine is (mostly) unhackable.

To be more serious seurity is often in conflict with simplicity, efficiency, usability, and many other good things.

A baseline level of security (and avoidance of insecurities) should be expected everywhere, docker allows many places to easily reach it and is often a good enough tradeoff for many realities.

that escalated quickly.

but I agree.

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