aquasecurity / aquasecurity/tracee

Unbounded disk space usage by capture feature

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area/capture kind/bug
Dominant language
Go
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Forks
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Avg merge
2d 8h
Merged PRs (30d)
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Description

Description

The capture feature of Tracee works by writing artifacts to the disk whenever some operation happens.
Some of the capture options might be exposed to huge loads in some environment, results the creation of many artifacts files on the disk.
However, disk is a resource of the operating system, and using it without bounds might result faults and unreasonable expenses for the user.
We should be able to address the disk usage issue in some manner.

Solution Options in My POW

Option 1: Stream Artifacts

If we stream the artifacts, than from that point on the responsibility for resources usage is on the other side of the stream.
In this case there is nothing we can do about it if we look at it naively.

Option 2: Bound Memory and Prioritize Artifacts

If we do use the memory with Tracee, we should allow the user to configure the maximum amount of disk Tracee can use.
If we implement it naively, it means just drop new captures after some load is captured.
In more practical thinking, I think we should prioritize new captures, and expose a way to prioritize captures in general.
We have the rules that determine if something is interesting or not, so I think that we can use rules detections to understand if some capture is important and avoid deleting it.

Contributor guide

Open the contributing guide

First steps

  1. Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
  2. Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
  3. Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
  4. Open a pull request that references the issue number.

Research direction

The issue does not name specific files or tests. Start by tracing the capture feature’s artifact-writing path and reviewing how capture options and rules detections determine artifacts. Define the disk limit and prioritization behavior, then verify that sustained capture load respects the configured bound without losing higher-priority artifacts.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Tech stack
go, linux
Domain
performance, security
Issue type
Feature
Difficulty
5/5
Estimated time
Over a week
Activity status
Stale
Clarity
Needs clarification
Newbie friendliness
25/100

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