Isolate is a sandbox built to safely run untrusted executables, like programs submitted by competitors in a programming contest. Isolate gives them a limited-access environment, preventing them from affecting the host system. It takes advantage of features specific to the Linux kernel, like namespaces and control groups.

Isolate was developed by Martin Mareš (mj@ucw.cz) and Bernard Blackham (bernard@blackham.com.au) and still maintained by the former author. Several other people contributed patches for features and bug fixes (see Git history for a list). Thanks!

Originally, Isolate was a part of the Moe Contest Environment, but it evolved to a separate project used by different contest systems, most prominently CMS. It now lives at GitHub, where you can submit bug reports and feature requests.

If you are interested in more details, please read Martin's and Bernard's papers on Isolate's design and grading system security published in the Olympiads in Informatics journal. Also, Isolate's manual page is available online.

The fastest way to start is grabbing the pre-built docker image at ghcr.io/minhnhatnoe/isolate:latest, which can be used as a standalone image or a base image.

Run the container with the --privileged flag to start the daemon. Make sure you mount appropriate directories to the default mount points at /bin, /lib and /usr (and probably /var/local/lib/isolate/ to put executable in the sandbox).

Use docker exec to trigger isolate runs (refer to the man page for additional details). A good starting point would be isolate --cg --init && isolate --cg --run -- <program> && isolate --cg --cleanup.

In your resulting image, install libcap (usually available as libcap and/or libcap-dev) and run the daemon with either isolate-cg-keeper --move-cg-neighbors or start_isolate (note that both will be blocking).

Privileges could be granted to the container in a more fine-grained manner. Practically, the container needs only CAP_SYS_ADMIN (for remounting cgroups as read-write) and CAP_NET_ADMIN (for creating sandbox network interfaces). Instead of using --privileged, you could grant only these capabilities with --cap-add CAP_SYS_ADMIN --cap-add CAP_NET_ADMIN.

Note that isolate-check-environment --execute requires access to multiple other directories, so it may only be run with --privileged.

To compile Isolate, you need:

• pkg-config
• headers for the libcap library (usually available in a libcap-dev package)

You may need a2x (found in AsciiDoc) for building manual. But if you only want the isolate binary, you can just run make isolate

Recommended system setup is described in sections INSTALLATION and REPRODUCIBILITY of the manual page. To install the systemd unit, run make install-systemd-units.

If your system is using systemd, run the installed unit (usually with systemctl enable isolate --now) and you're ready to use isolate.

• isolate-cg-keeper: Establish the Control Group subtree for running processes and future sandboxes. Should be started before running any isolate and isolate-check-environment commands. If isolate-cg-keeper is not the sole process at its designated Control Group, execute with --move-cg-neighbors to avoid violating Control Group v2's No Internal Process Constraint.
• isolate-check-environment: Check current environment for sources of run-time variability and other issues. Should be run after starting isolate-cg-keeper. To apply recommended fixes, run with --execute.
• isolate: The sandbox trigger. Refer to the man page for guidance.