cr0 blog: A few thoughts on Fuchsia security

submited by

Style Pass

2021-06-12 21:30:06

I want to say a few words about my current adventure. I joined the Fuchsia project at its inception and worked on the daunting task of building and shipping a brand new open-source operating system.

As my colleague Chris noted, pointing to this comparison of a device running a Linux-based OS vs Fuchsia, making Fuchsia invisible was not an easy feat.

Of course, under the hood, a lot is different. We built a brand new message-passing kernel, new connectivity stacks, component model, file-systems, you name it. And of course, there are a few security things I'm excited about.

I wrote a few posts on this blog about the sandboxing technologies a few of us were building in Chrome/ChromeOS at the time. A while back, the situation was challenging on Linux to say the least. We had to build a special a setuid binary to sandbox Chrome and seccomp-bpf was essentially created to improve the state of sandboxing on ChromeOS, and Linux generally, further.

With lots of work, we got into a point where the Chrome renderer sandbox was *very* tight in respect to the rest of the system. Most of the remaining attack surface was in IPC interfaces and the remaining available system interfaces were as essential as it could get on Linux.