[Haskell-cafe] More on the random idea

[Andrew Coppin]

Donald Bruce Stewart wrote:
> claus.reinke:
>   
>>> The #haskell people have been working on this for about 3 years now.
>>> The result is the 'runplugs' program, which I've talked about in
>>> previous mails.
>>>
>>>   http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~dons/code/lambdabot/scripts/RunPlugs.hs
>>>
>>> It uses hs-plugins for the evaluation, along with the points about IO
>>> prevention via type checking, resource limits controlled by the OS,
>>> language extension preventions, and a trusted (audited) module base.
>>>       
>> great! and since it is presumably in daily use, there is both pressure to
>> fix holes as soon as they are discovered, and ongoing discovery in a
>> safe (or at least friendly) environment.
>>     
>
> I've listed the mechanisms we use, and exploits that have been thought
> of, or discovered, over the years, on the page:
>
>     http://haskell.org/haskellwiki/Safely_running_untrusted_Haskell_code
>   

I'm liking where this is going... ;-)

Personally, I would think that denying access to "dangerous" funtions - 
or better yet, only allowing access to obviously "safe" functions - 
would be one half the problem, and using OS constraints to enforce 
resource limits would be the other half. But then, I'm no expert, so 
perhaps I've missed something...