Seccomp


seccomp is a computer security facility in the Linux kernel. seccomp allows a process to make a one-way transition into a "secure" state where it cannot make any system calls except exit, sigreturn, read and write to already-open file descriptors. Should it attempt any other system calls, the kernel will terminate the process with SIGKILL or SIGSYS. In this sense, it does not virtualize the system's resources but isolates the process from them entirely.
seccomp mode is enabled via the system call using the PR_SET_SECCOMP argument, or via the system call. seccomp mode used to be enabled by writing to a file, /proc/self/seccomp, but this method was removed in favor of prctl. In some kernel versions, seccomp disables the RDTSC x86 instruction, which returns the number of elapsed processor cycles since power-on, used for high-precision timing.
seccomp-bpf is an extension to seccomp that allows filtering of system calls using a configurable policy implemented using Berkeley Packet Filter rules. It is used by OpenSSH and vsftpd as well as the Google Chrome/Chromium web browsers on Chrome OS and Linux.

History

seccomp was first devised by Andrea Arcangeli in January 2005 for use in public grid computing and was originally intended as a means of safely running untrusted compute-bound programs. It was merged into the Linux kernel mainline in kernel version 2.6.12, which was released on March 8, 2005.

Software using seccomp or seccomp-bpf