User-Level Sandboxing: a Safe and Efficient Mechanism for Extensibility
RICHARD R. WEST, Jason Gloudon · 2003
... deployed for the specific needs of individual applications. This paper describes a safe and efficient method for userlevel extensibility that requires only minimal changes to the kernel. A sandboxing technique is described that supports multiple logical protection domains within the same address space at user-level. This approach allows applications to register sandboxed code with the system, that may be executed in the context of any process. Our approach differs from other implementations that require special hardware support, such as segmentation or tagged translation lookaside buffers (TLBs), to either implement multiple protection domains in a single address space, or to support fast switching between address spaces. Likewise, we do not require the entire system to be written in a type-safe language, to provide fine-grained protection domains. Instead, our user-level sandboxing technique requires only pagedbased virtual memory support, and the requirement that extension code is written either in a type-safe language, or by a trusted source. Using a fast