A Fan-Out Sandboxing File System

Sandboxfs isolates modifications to the file system made by a a set of "bad" processes from the other "good" processes on a system. Sandboxfs also isolates file-system changes made by the "good" processes from the "bad" processes. Sandboxfs leverages the flexible input filters from Tracefs, good and bad processes are described using arbitrarily complex logical expressions.

To create a sandbox, we duplicate the super-block structure of Sandboxfs and attach a logical expression that dictates which processes belong to this sandbox. Whenever an operation crosses the Sandboxfs mount point, Sandboxfs directs the operation to the appropriate super-block. Each Sandboxfs super-block object has its own VFS caches (inode and dentry), but for efficiency shares the underlying page cache for common data. We call these separate per-entity caches for each directory split-view caches.

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