Simon,

I don't really have a horse in this race (as I said I didn't write
sandboxR), but it seems like if you control library (to prevent "untrusted"
packages, specifically including things like Rcpp and Rffi), and dyn.load
the executing arbitrary compiled code issue can be curtailed. If I'm wrong
please let me know, I'm always looking to learn.

I assume XXXX in your example was some C code you whipped up and then
loaded using one of the methods above? Or a .Call to an existing internal R
function?

~G

On Wed, Dec 19, 2012 at 9:12 AM, Simon Urbanek
<simon.urbanek@r-project.org>wrote:

> On Dec 19, 2012, at 11:21 AM, Gabriel Becker wrote:
>
> > See also: https://github.com/Rapporter/sandboxR
> >
> > sandboxR (not written by me) is a proof of concept for security inside R
> > (as opposed to security outside R as discussed above) via evaluating all
> R
> > commands in a specialized security environment (R environment that is)
> > which contains safe replacements for blacklisted functions.
> >
>
> It is a good example of false security. For the reasons mentioned before
> this doesn't work and can be circumvented:
>
> > sandbox("XXXX('tail /etc/group')")
> _developer:*:204:
> _locationd:*:205:
> _carddav:*:206:
> _detachedsig:*:207:
> _trustevaluationagent:*:208:
> _odchpass:*:209:
> _timezone:*:210:
> _lda:*:211:
> _cvms:*:212:
> _usbmuxd:*:213:
> [1] 0
>
> The problem is that you can try to plug holes (and sandboxR is trying hard
> to plug a lot of them), but there will always be new ones. It's simply the
> wrong approach IMHO.
>
> Cheers,
> Simon
>
>
>
> > HTH,
> > ~G
> >
> >
> >
> > On Wed, Dec 19, 2012 at 5:33 AM, Dirk Eddelbuettel <edd@debian.org>
> wrote:
> >
> >>
> >> Jeroen has a package devoted to the sandboxing approach in conjunction
> with
> >> the system-level AppArmor facility:  RAppArmor.  See
> >>
> >>  http://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/RAppArmor/index.html
> >>
> >> and more details at
> >>
> >>  https://github.com/jeroenooms/RAppArmor#readme
> >>
> >> Dirk
> >>
> >> --
> >> Dirk Eddelbuettel | edd@debian.org | http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com
> >>
> >> ______________________________________________
> >> R-devel@r-project.org mailing list
> >> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
> >>
> >
> >
> >
> > --
> > Gabriel Becker
> > Graduate Student
> > Statistics Department
> > University of California, Davis
> >
> >       [[alternative HTML version deleted]]
> >
> > ______________________________________________
> > R-devel@r-project.org mailing list
> > https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
> >
> >
>
>


-- 
Gabriel Becker
Graduate Student
Statistics Department
University of California, Davis

	[[alternative HTML version deleted]]

