Sandlock: Isolating AI Agent Code with Unprivileged Linux Primitives
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Yusheng Zheng et al. submitted a paper proposing Sandlock, a lightweight Linux process sandbox for isolating AI agent code. Its design compiles input-independent static policies into kernel-enforced rules, while a small supervisor process handles runtime decisions and virtualization effects. The authors claim this split lets Sandlock enforce filesystem, network, IPC, and syscall policies without root, cgroups, images, or mandatory namespaces. The authors measured Sandlock's startup overhead at about 5 milliseconds on a workstation, and running Redis reached bare-metal throughput (within measurement noise); its pipeline operators also support per-stage isolation to separate the capabilities of data, network, and untrusted content. All the above performance figures are the authors' own claims.
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- Hacker News AISandlock: Confining AI Agent Code with Unprivileged Linux Primitives
Sandlock is a lightweight Linux process sandbox that compiles static, input-independent policy into kernel-enforced rules while a narrow supervisor handles runtime-dependent decisions and virtualized effects, enforcing filesystem, network, IPC, and syscall policies without root, cgroups, images, or mandatory namespaces. It supports dynamic network decisions, HTTP-level access control, TOCTOU-safe inspection of execve arguments, and reversible filesystem effects, adding roughly 5 ms of startup overhead and running Redis at bare-metal throughput on the authors' workstation. Its pipeline operator further supports per-stage confinement for separating data, network, and untrusted-content capabilities.
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