this post was submitted on 30 Aug 2024
15 points (89.5% liked)
Linux
48323 readers
637 users here now
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
Rules
- Posts must be relevant to operating systems running the Linux kernel. GNU/Linux or otherwise.
- No misinformation
- No NSFW content
- No hate speech, bigotry, etc
Related Communities
Community icon by Alpár-Etele Méder, licensed under CC BY 3.0
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
No and to be honest without a clear comparison with the advantages AND disadvantages with the most popular solutions, e.g containers with implementations like Docker or Podman, I don't think I ever will.
Obviously it's nice to have alternatives which I bet can be interesting in specific use cases but without a way to understand in which specific situations it would be worth investing to learn the tooling, principles, etc then I would, naively, stay with the status quo.
TL;DR: any comparison vs Docker?
I'm not an expert, but I'll try my best to compare it to docker:
You can think of nsjail as a lightweight frontend for kernel isolation features like namespaces, sys call filtering, and the like.
Docker is also a frontend for some of those kernel features, but its original goal was not security isolation, but rather isolation for the sake of reproducibility. This isn't to say that docker isn't secure, they did add those features eventually, but they are less intuitive to change and mess with, and you have some added complexities. Whereas nsjail stays as close to the system as possible. As far as I'm aware, there's no concept of an image, and its not necessary for every app to have an entire OS user land with it (although you can if you want to).
If your goal is security, docker's defaults are reasonably good, but also made to not get in the way of most applications. This might be good enough for many. However, docker's security is more difficult to customize and less straightforward if you need to change it.
If your goal is security, and more so than docker's defaults, nsjail gets you there muchhh more easily. Whether nsjail has more security features than docker, I don't know.
Thanks a lot for taking the time to explain.
I did notice CTF on the description so I imagine "escaping" it is "harder" than with containers. I recently participated to SplinterCon which included a "block-a-thon" (cf day 2 of https://splintercon.net/brussels/ ) to try to escape a limited environment, approximately simulating the limited Internet access of some political regime. It might be interesting in that context too.
Could also be interesting then to distinguish which defaults are changed compared to Docker ones or examples for which nsjail is currently preferred.