Code Runner – a Dbus service to execute code

Code Runner is an idea that spawned off from another open-source project codechecker that I am part of. In the codechecker project, we have a command line utility called setuid_helper, that runs a user’s submission program in a restricted environment. The program is restricted accesses to resources like CPU time, memory, number of files it can open, number of bytes it can write onto the filesystem etc. On top of this the program can be run as a unprivileged user. The setuid_helper utility also provides that option of running the user’s program in a chroot’ed environment. If you think about it, all malicious submissions can be ‘safely handled’ using the setuid_helper program. The Code Runner project provides a Dbus service that wraps the functionality of the setuid_helper. The advantages of the Dbus service is that, almost all high level programming languages have Dbus bindings and this service becomes immediately accessible to all those developers. It also abstracts away the details of setuid_helper. Currently, the Code Runner project is available here. The gitorious repo has a README that helps in getting started. Depending on the no. of consumers for the Dbus service, I would spend time on writing an installer for the same. If you find this idea cool, feel free to drop a comment 🙂

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