Minijail

The Minijail homepage and main repo is https://android.googlesource.com/platform/external/minijail/.

There might be other copies floating around, but this is the official one!

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What is it?

Minijail is a sandboxing and containment tool used in Chrome OS and Android. It provides an executable that can be used to launch and sandbox other programs, and a library that can be used by code to sandbox itself.

Getting the code

You're one git clone away from happiness.

$ git clone https://android.googlesource.com/platform/external/minijail
$ cd minijail

Releases are tagged as linux-vXX: https://android.googlesource.com/platform/external/minijail/+refs

Building

See the HACKING.md document for more details.

Release process

See the RELEASE.md document for more details.

Additional tools

See the tools/README.md document for more details.

Contact

We've got a couple of contact points.

• [email protected]: Public user & developer mailing list.
• [email protected]: Internal Google user mailing list.
• [email protected]: Internal Google developer mailing list.
• crbug.com/list: Existing bug reports & feature requests.
• crbug.com/new: File new bug reports & feature requests.
• AOSP Gerrit: Code reviews.

Talks and presentations

The following talk serves as a good introduction to Minijail and how it can be used.

Video, slides.

Example usage

The Chromium OS project has a comprehensive sandboxing document that is largely based on Minijail.

After you play with the simple examples below, you should check that out.

Change root to any user

# id
uid=0(root) gid=0(root) groups=0(root),128(pkcs11)
# minijail0 -u jorgelo -g 5000 /usr/bin/id
uid=72178(jorgelo) gid=5000(eng) groups=5000(eng)

Drop root while keeping some capabilities

# minijail0 -u jorgelo -c 3000 -- /bin/cat /proc/self/status
Name: cat
...
CapInh: 0000000000003000
CapPrm: 0000000000003000
CapEff: 0000000000003000
CapBnd: 0000000000003000