Safety: ptrace, seccomp, whitelists/blacklists about up

[diego898]

There was a related (though not duplicate) discussion in #8

[jnovek]

Using ptrace or seccomp seem to be new (but likely rather fiddly) additions to the list of potential read-only tools.

I only speak a little golang but it seems to me like using seccomp is a promising avenue because there is an actively maintained lib for interacting with it.

https://github.com/seccomp/libseccomp-golang

I think I'm going to dig through the docs for the fun of it.

This is pretty far afield of my normal experience, sorry if this suggestion is totally stupid. :-)

[akavel]

As @diego898 mentioned, some comments in #8 might be worth a look (not all of them, the very initial version of up was somewhat different and executed the pipeline on every keystroke, not just on Enter, and this topic is mixed a lot in that thread).

• A few more random comments in the wiki (though I didn't give the wiki as a whole the love it deserves...).
• A subthread about some related challenges from another person in today's discussion on HN
• As to whitelists, as far as I'm aware, some flags on seemingly innocent commands can still be dangerous; so I'm personally not sold on it, and would be afraid of lulling users into a false sense of security; for now I prefer to leave the responsibility on them, and with Enter as the "execute" key, to me it doesn't feel much different from a regular shell prompt in this aspect.
• Another HN subthread about a 'maybe' tool that could possibly do something related (or not?), and my reply that one could try playing with $SHELL to wire 'maybe' to up, potentially.

@jnovek I will certainly not work on that myself, but if you're interested in experimenting, I will try to be at least helpful from the up side of things :) [I'm kinda having a lot on my plate now, and still haven't regained all of my "mojo" towards up after releasing it, but I love interesting ideas, and this one for sure is :) I feel I would find fun in watching where you might get here :) and if you're stubbornly curious enough, I know by myself you might get amazingly far :)]