Mxc: Microsoft Execution Containers version 1.0.0

I’ve had a good think about this, and while it’s good to see them finally answering bubblewrap, the truth is that we as an industry have been ridiculously at permissioning for some time and this does not solve this. It’s all very well saying we have read only resource access, but then you connect up to JIRA and all of a sudden you’ve got a different identity system, different resource model and and more complexity than you can shake a stick at.

Our current answer of just making the security model more and more complex isn’t working. It just means that, when things inevitably fail, we can say “well, they didn’t secure it correctly”. When even describing what is correct is hard, and setting it up is harder.

Honestly, this looks good, but we need a root and branch rethink of security if we want something that can protect us from rogue agents.

Sadly, skimming the docs about how the different backends work makes me think that almost this entire project was done by a recent-gen LLM that interpreted its instructions as “make these things work at all costs” instead of “make a considered design that cleanly and securely fits its use case”.

Even the bubblewrap integration docs are basically a stream of consciousness vibe splat. I have approximately zero confidence in the results.

(reposted from the other copy of basically this post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50026061)

I've tried it, it's not a 1.0 release. This is more like an early tech preview.

The biggest news - and the most welcome one - is that W11 25H2 August cumulative update now allows anyone to set up App containers without administrative privileges. Then they built mxc on top of that.

This is a first step: uncertain, unstable, with many improvements to build upon; but always a step, enabling pioneers out there to explore something new.

Thanks for sharing!

What are these people running from? They're not! They're running to the world's toughest competition in town!

> An agent cannot be its own security authority. It must run within a boundary defined by the developer or organization and enforced independently of the agent itself.

...so make it its own security principal, distinct from the human user?

> Without a managed execution boundary, the agent may decide that changing the server configuration is the fastest way to complete the task and potentially break the production site.

It can decide that even with the execution boundary in place, you know. What matters if it can actually act that out.

All in all, a very sloppily written announcement. Almost as if it was written by—

Can I use this as a generic app permissions boundary or do I have to somehow fake it as an "agent"? We are well past the point where I need to be able to lock down that my music player has no ability to read my SSH keys or whatever.

Naturally, this will be gated to corporate customers - the plebs do not get access to better security unless they pay for a top tier license.

I want a super-simple way to restrict an app's read/write to a specific dir. This is an incredibly useful solution that should have existed 20+ years ago. Why is this not a thing? This will basically solve most security issues immediately, in a super user-friendly way.

I don't believe this is what MXC accomplishes. Happy to be told otherwise!

Its a good idea and enterprise customers will love it.