hyperlight-dev / hyperlight-dev/hyperlight

Consider creating a wrapper for hyperlight-host that locates sandboxes in remote processes

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#1,706 3 comments 2 reactions 0 assignees View on GitHub
lifecycle/confirmed
Dominant language
Rust
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Description

It should be possible to create a drop-in replacement for the hyperlight-host crate that exposes the same public API, but wraps the `UninitializedSandbox` and `MultiUseSandbox` types with wrappers that implement its calls via (optionally?) making RPCs to different processes. This might be useful for people who wish to run sandboxes in remote, low-privilege processes for even-more-defense-in-depth (e.g. against hypervisor kernel vulnerabilities), and might allow working around per-process resource limits.

This should be possible to do via a new crate which is a drop-in wrapper around the hyperlight-host crate, avoiding the need for any changes in Hyperlight itself.

Semantically, it also shouldn't require any changes to other crates that depend on hyperlight-host, like hyperlight-{wasm,js,unikraft}. Unfortunately, due to rust-lang/cargo#9227, there may be distribution challenges due to the inability to for a root crate to override `hyperlight-host` with some hypothetical `hyperlight-host-remote-process-wrapper` throughout the transitive dependency graph. The wrapper crate would either need to use `name = "hyperlight-host"` and be used as a git/path dependency, or hyperlight-{wasm,js,unikraft} would need to be made aware of its existence/configured to optionally depend on it.

Contributor guide

Open the contributing guide

Research direction

Start by reviewing the public API of the hyperlight-host crate, especially UninitializedSandbox and MultiUseSandbox, and how hyperlight-wasm, hyperlight-js, and hyperlight-unikraft depend on it. Investigate the Cargo dependency and override constraints described in the issue. Done would mean a separate drop-in crate can preserve the API while locating sandboxes in remote processes without requiring changes to dependent crates.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Tech stack
rust
Domain
operating-systems, security
Issue type
Feature
Difficulty
5/5
Estimated time
Over a week
Activity status
Active
Clarity
Needs clarification
Newbie friendliness
35/100

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