Let’s Talk More About Virtualisation and Sandboxes

In one of our first posts, we dove into the basic background of containers, virtualisation and sandboxes. We covered how these are three of the most common terms used when talking about general computer security and mobile security, with all three being used to protect mobile applications. But what more can we learn? Let’s take a deeper look.

Virtualisation provides an abstraction over the physical hardware layer for an Operating System (OS). This abstraction allows any OS to run other OSes as guests on the same hardware. This abstraction also provides a separate environment for an application. While you can share files and peripheral devices between the main and guest OS, the guest OS will mostly be isolated from the main OS. In other words, users created on the guest OS and applications installed on the guest OS will not be available on the main OS. This flexibility of abstracting the hardware makes it possible to run more than one guest OS using the same hardware.

In addition, it allows us to take and store snapshots of the guest OS operation at any point in time when in similar environments also running the virtualisation software. Doing so makes the deployment of software and its dependencies far more manageable than installing all of them manually on many physical devices. One can also efficiently run different applications built for other OSes on a singular OS, regardless of the version or type of main OS. In this scenario, an application running in guest OS A cannot interfere with an application running on guest OS B

The term sandbox refers to an environment that has been created for the sole purpose of providing a safe place for testing, auditing, or analysing without interference from other similar production environments. This form of isolation – or sandboxing – is most common on server deployments. A typical example of this is the Apple push notification service sandbox.

On the other hand, the term sandbox could also refer to an isolated process running in an OS environment, shielded from other processes running in the same OS. When I say “shielded”, I mean that process B cannot interfere with process A’s execution and allocated resources or even communicate with process A without going through the device’s OS/kernel. This form of isolation on the OS level can be called “process sandboxing”.

I have now outlined some common ways to isolate software and application processes from one another. But did you know that the benefit of securely isolating an unrelated aspect of a software process from others has had a significant impact on the quality of software one can develop?

The following paragraphs will outline some of the benefits of the sandboxing and isolation technique.

To continue reading this blog post, head on over to the Okay website where we dive further into sandboxes, security breaches, and how it all connects to SCA.