Why everyone needs to know some coding: last-mile sandboxing

This talk will: - elaborate on what makes sandboxing difficult (code is data), - outline past approaches to sandboxing (web browsers), and - summarize the problems of past approaches (who watches the watchers?) It will then describe a new approach that replaces the hard-coded coarse-grained protections of browsers with declarative fine-grained protections organized by the real-world effects of computers (syscalls). In outline, the approach separates untrusted software in apps from a tiny set of programmable policies. Each policy is advice that applies to a single syscall and decides whether to permit the syscall or not. This approach is implemented in a fork of Lua for purely text-mode apps. The browser provides default policies, but tries to gradually empower each person over time to take ownership of the policies on their browser without any mediation from others. In the process, it hopes to educate people on some basic aspects of programming. The talk will describe the new challenges posed by this approach, including: - educating people to never paste in code into policies without understanding it - educating people on the value of minimalism in policy code (and indeed all code) - educating people on the need for policy code to itself be side-effect-free - coaching people on good and poor changes to policy code when intended uses are disallowed by policies