Untrusted environment: Difference between revisions

Perl 6 doesn't really provide a high security mode for untrusted environments. By default, Perl 6 is sort of a walled garden. It is difficult to access memory directly, especially in locations not controlled by the Perl 6 interpreter, so unauthorized memory access is unlikely to be a threat with default Perl 6 commands and capabilities.

It is possible (and quite easy) to run Perl 6 with a restricted setting which will disable many IO commands that can be used to access or modify things outside of the Perl 6 interpreter. However, a determined bad actor could theoretically work around the restrictions, especially if the nativecall interface is available. The nativecall interface allows directly calling in to and executing code from C libraries so anything possible in C is now possible in Perl 6. This is great for all of the power it provides, but along with that comes the responsibility and inherent security risk.

Really, if you want to lock down a Perl 6 instance so it is "safe" for unauthenticated, untrusted, general access, you are better off running it in some kind of locked down virtual machine or sandbox managed by the operating system rather than trying to build an ad hoc "safe" environment.