[Python-Dev] Restricted interpreter (original) (raw)

Gustavo Niemeyer niemeyer@conectiva.com
Fri, 8 Nov 2002 18:04:56 -0200

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This weekend I'm going to work on a "restricted" python interpreter for http://acm.uva.es/problemset/. That site offers online programming contests, including an online judge to check algorithm implementations for hundreds of problems. I belive it'd be nice for the Python community to have access to something like that.

This interpreter should have limited functionality so that malicious users won't be able to access the filesystem, sockets, and other "dangerous" functionality.

I'm not sure if that will be useful for the stock Python interpreter, as its application is very specific, but at least it could be a nice starting point for similar projects.

I've included here a quick list of changes to the python interpreter to achieve that. Do you remember about any other possible problems?

include a '-r' flag, which enables a global restricted flag, and implies -E, and -S.
depending on the flag, don't let scripts import posixmodule, (we can't remove it, or python won't compile);
depending on the flag, change the way module imports work, using only the sys.path Python has started with;
depending on the flag, limit instantiation of 'file' types (remember that type(sys.stdout) returns the 'file' type, so removing it from builtins is not enough).
remove all, but the builtin modules which could be useful for some algorithm: _codecs, array, cmath, binascii, crypt, cStringIO, md5, math, _locale, _sre, pcre, pyexpat, regex, sha, strop, timing, struct, time, xreadlines, unicodedata, _weakref;

-- Gustavo Niemeyer

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