[Python-Dev] Challenge: Please break this! (a.k.a restricted mode revisited)

[Jon Ribbens]

On Tue, Apr 12, 2016 at 01:38:09PM +0200, Maciej Fijalkowski wrote:
> Jon, let me reiterate. You asked people to break it (that's the title
> of the thread) and they did so almost immediately. Then you patched
> the thing and asked them to break it again and they did. Now the
> faulty assumption here is that this procedure, repeated enough times
> will produce a secure environment - this is not how security works,

That is not an accurate summary of what has happened so far,
nor am I making that assumption. You are misunderstanding the
purpose of the experiment - I am not sure how, as I have tried
to be quite clear.

The question is: with a minimal (or empty) set of builtins, and a
restriction on ast.Name and ast.Attribute nodes, can exec/eval be
made 'safe' so they cannot execute code outside the sandbox. The
answer appears to be "yes", if the restriction is "^f?_". (If you
additionally inject external objects to the namespace then they need
to be proxied and mro() prevented.)

> You can't do that just by asking on the mailing list and whacking
> all the examples.

If anyone had managed to find any more examples of holes in the
original featureset after the first couple then I would agree with
you, but they haven't. 

> As others pointed out, this particular approach (with maybe
> different details) has been tried again and again and again

This simply isn't true either. As far as I can see, only
RestrictedPython has tried anything remotely similar, and
to the best of my ability to determine, that project is not
considerd a failure.