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Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

Wait, can you provide the positive definition for "sandbox" you're relying on here?

To me ‘a sandbox’ is a secured context, which is specific to whatever is in it. It is not a generic thing unless we are literally referring to a real-world box with sand in it, and I’ve kinda hit the breaking point with the term in tech. ‘A sandboxed application’ to me is an instrumented and controlled deployment of an application that can only make the sys/network/ipc calls the deployer expects and appreciates, which are then themselves filtered and monitored. A sandboxed deployment of an application? Sure. That’s a thing to me. But each application needs different privileges and does different things. Sandboxing an application may involve lots of different technologies. Eg the way I think about it, things like seccomp, apparmor, et al also aren’t themselves ‘sandboxes’, they’re enforcement mechanisms which rely on knowing and configuring them to monitor and enforce what the app should and shouldn’t do. A lot of things that assist with sandboxing may also be combined in different ways to get to a more secure environment, in which the app is sandboxed.

You may just be using a personalized definition of that word, that differs from what it means.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sandbox_(computer_security)

Notably, a sandbox exists to separate one thing from other things. Limiting/filtering/monitoring what the sandboxes thing can do are often components of that, but the underlying premise is about separation.

Containers, VMs, etc. are 100% examples of sandboxing based on the actual industry definition of the term.

I’m saying I don’t think sandbox is a noun, I think it’s a verb. I also don’t get why this is such an issue to you? A container simply is not a sandbox by itself. The collection of technologies that can sandbox can be used to sandbox a container, or an app running in a container, or whatever you want. A door lock isn’t security, a door lock is used to lock your door, which gives you part of a security strategy. Same principle.

> I’m saying I don’t think sandbox is a noun, I think it’s a verb.

You are incorrect.

What background or context do you have that you base this claim on?

I already gave you a link above with a definition of sandbox, the noun, and a list of example technologies that it applies to.

If you’re going to get fired up about people you feel are misusing this term, and then ignore citations about its actual definition, I think the ball’s in your court to back up your claim.

I mean… I’m flattered you think I’m making some kind of statement here but there is no claim. I literally stated an opinion I hold in a comment on HN, I didn’t write a you a thesis. Followed by explaining further the details of that opinion.

I’ve asked what background leads to your conclusion, because if you have eg written some sandboxing tooling, I’d be curious to give it a look. Always up to learn things, and I am more than a little baffled by how upset the comments I’m replying to here sound. You’ve linked me to Wikipedia, and another commenter asserts I can ‘just look it up on google scholar’. That seems pretty dismissive and reductive overall.

He's obviously right about the noun/verb thing. You can just look this up on Google Scholar. I think you're sort of broadly wrong about how fussy the definition of a "sandbox" is, but you're at least saying something coherent there, even if it's an idiosyncratic definition.

A door lock is a lock and you can lock a door lock. A container can be a sandbox and you can use a container to sandbox.

No they are not. The "industry" totally disagrees with this statement as well.

This is definitely false. "The industry" calls everything a sandbox.

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