FAQ.md

In Rapporter/sandboxR: Filtering "malicious" calls

This file is heavily under development (just like other parts of the package)!

Why do not you allow foo function from package bar?

In short: as I do not need it :)

Longer answer: I do think that users should ever touch filesystem on a shared, web-based environment as those functions should be addressed by the hosting application. E.g. if a user would create a plot in a script then that should be saved to an image on the disk automatically without calling png or other R functions in the user-driven R session. Similarly data upload should be done in the web application, not in the user-driven R session. Also users should not use complex functions and package-like environments with S4 classes (not that I hate S4 I promise!), as those should be compiled to a package and submitted to CRAN. After that the package could be whitelisted :)

Workaround: the package uses a static list of blacklisted functions, but feel free to use your own list in your custom environment.

Filtering resource-hungry calls

There are some function calls which are "malicious", but are not addressed by sandboxR. These are usually tries to take a lot of resources for nothing, so not modifying files, but "just" wasting server resources.

A great example of @Jeroen (http://stackoverflow.com/a/9145930/564164):

library(multicore);
forkbomb <- function(){
  repeat{
    parallel(forkbomb());
  }
}
forkbomb();

~~These problems would not ever be addressed by sandboxR as e.g. Apparmor can do a handy job here with ease.~~ Besides the fact that Apparmor/SELinux etc. can address this problem easily, sandbox has a timeout option and would stop executing user defined R calls after given period of time (default set to 10 seconds).

Rapporter/sandboxR documentation built on May 9, 2019, 9:21 a.m.