Hacker News Reader

Comment by redleader55 | Hacker News Reader

Agentic workloads create and then run code. You don't want to just run that code in a "normal" environment like a container, or even a very well protected VM. There are other options, ofc - eg. gvisor, crossvm, firecracker, etc, but this one is uncommon enough to have a small number of attackers trying to hack it.

View on HN

What's wrong with a well protected VM? Especially compared to something where the security selling point is "no one uses it" (according to your argument; I don't know how secure this actually is)

Nothing, but "there are already working options" does not necessarily mean we shouldn't try new (and sometimes weird) things

Yeah but GP was answering to a comment saying "you don't want to run code in a well protected VM". Which is of course complete non sense to say and GP was right to question it.

GP says "You don't want to just run that code in ... even a very well protected VM." Why?

Because unless you can fund several teams - kernel, firmware(bios,etc), GPU drivers, qemu, KVM, extra hardening(eg. qemu runs under something like bpfilter) + a red team, security through obscurity is cheaper. The attack surface area is just too large.

What is this "security through obscurity" you're talking about? We're talking about running linux in a VM running in a browser. That has just as much attack surface (and in some ways, more) as running linux in a hypervisor.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com