[Rd] R in a sandbox/jail

[Barry Rowlingson]

Someone recently suggested building a system for automatically testing
student's R programs. They would upload them to our Virtual Learning
Environment, which would then run the code on some inputs and see if
it got the right output. If it does, the student scores points for
that course.

My first thought was "you want to run unchecked, student-submitted
code on a server that has access to students' grades?".

Can this be done securely? The idea might be to run R in a
chroot-jail, freshly generated for each run. The jail would not be
able to access anything outside of it, and once the R session has
finished the calling process can pick up the output from within the
jail.

Maybe that's overkill. Perhaps if you run the user's code as an
ordinary user and store the answers/results in a directory only root
can read that would work (given no local root exploits). Other
precautions could include limiting the runtime or cputime for the R
session. It might be necessary to limit network access too.

 Anyone done anything like this? Personally I think there are too many
other problems with automated systems like this, particularly that
just because a program produces the correct output that makes it a
good one. Sure, at the production stage that's a requirement, but I'd
rather students learnt to program well than to program correctly -
since correctness follows goodness but goodness does not follow
correctness. But that's an argument for another day!

Barry