NsJail – process isolation and sandboxing utility

NsJail is a process isolation tool designed to run applications inside tightly controlled environments.

It combines several Linux kernel security mechanisms rather than relying on a single isolation technique, making it suitable for executing potentially unsafe programs, hosting security challenges, fuzzing software or restricting desktop applications. A jail can be assembled directly from command-line options or described in a Protocol Buffers configuration file, allowing complex policies to be reused rather than reconstructed for every invocation.

This is free and open source software.

Key Features

• Supports standalone execution, direct execution, continuous process re-execution and inetd-style TCP listener modes.
• Can isolate UTS, mount, PID, IPC, network, user, cgroup and time namespaces.
• Supports chroot, pivot_root, read-only bind mounts, writable bind mounts and tmpfs mounts.
• Controls CPU time, address space, open file descriptors and process counts with resource limits.
• Integrates with cgroups for CPU, memory and process restrictions.
• Filters system calls with seccomp-bpf policies expressed using the Kafel policy language.
• Can move or clone network interfaces into a jail and supports MACVLAN networking.
• Offers user-mode networking through pasta.
• Supports custom UID and GID mappings inside user namespaces.
• Can selectively retain Linux capabilities rather than exposing the complete capability set.
• Provides example configurations for common application isolation scenarios.
• Supports reusable, structured configuration through Protocol Buffers as an alternative to lengthy command lines.

Website: github.com/google/nsjail
Support:
Developer: Google
License: Apache License 2.0

NsJail is written in C++. Learn C++ with our recommended free books and free tutorials.

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