skia2/experimental/webtry/DESIGN.md

Design

Overview

Allows trying out Skia code in the browser.

Security

We're putting a C++ compiler on the web, and promising to run the results of user submitted code, so security is a large concern. Security is handled in a layered approach, using a combination of seccomp-bpf, chroot jail and rlimits.

seccomp-bpf - Used to limit the types of system calls that the user code can make. Any attempts to make a system call that isn't allowed causes the application to terminate immediately.

chroot jail - The code is run in a chroot jail, making the rest of the operating system files unreachable from the running code.

rlimits - Used to limit the resources the running code can get access to, for example runtime is limited to 5s of CPU.

User submitted code is also restricted in the following ways:

• Limited to 10K of code total.
• No preprocessor use is allowed (no lines can begin with #includes).

Architecture

The server runs on GCE, and consists of a Go Web Server that calls out to the c++ compiler and executes code in a chroot jail. See the diagram below:

   +–––––––––––––+    |             |    |  Browser    |    |             |    +––––––+––––––+           |    +––––––+––––––+    |             |    |             |    | Web Server  |    |             |    |   (Go)      |    |             |    |             |    +–––––––+–––––+            |    +–––––––+––––––––––+    | chroot jail      |     |  +––––––––––––––+|     |  | seccomp      ||     |  |  +––––––––––+||     |  |  |User code |||     |  |  |          |||     |  |  +––––––––––+||     |  +––––––––––––––+|    |                  |    +––––––––––––––––––+

The user code is expanded into a simple template and linked against libskia and a couple other .o files that contain main() and the code that sets up the seccomp and rlimit restrictions. This code also sets up the SkCanvas that is handed to the user code. Any code the user submits is restricted to running in a single function that looks like this:

void draw(SkCanvas* canvas) {
  // User code goes here.
}

The user code is tracked by taking an MD5 hash of the code The template is expanded out into .cpp, which is compiled into .o, which is then linked together with all the other libs and object files to create an executable named . That executable is copied into a directory /home/webtry/inout, that is accessible to both the web server and the schroot jail. The application is then run in the schroot jail, writing its response, .png, out into the same directory, /home/webtry/inout/, where is it read by the web server and returned to the user.

Startup and config

The server is started and stopped via:

sudo /etc/init.d/webtry [start|stop|restart]

By sysv init only handles starting and stopping a program once, so we use Monit to monitor the application and restart it if it crashes. The config is in:

/etc/monit/conf.d/webtry

The chroot jail is implemented using schroot, its configuration file is found in:

/etc/schroot/chroot.d/webtry

The seccomp configuration is in main.cpp and only allows the following system calls:

exit_group
exit
fstat
read
write
close
mmap
munmap
brk

Database

Code submitted is stored in an SQL database so that it can be referenced later, i.e. we can let users bookmark their SkFiddles.

The storage layer will be Cloud SQL (a cloud version of MySQL). Back of the envelope estimates of traffic come out to a price of a about $1/month.

All passwords for MySQL are stored in valentine.

To connect to the database from the skia-webtry-b server:

$ mysql --host=173.194.83.52 --user=root --password

Initial setup of the database, the user, and the only table:

CREATE DATABASE webtry;
USE webtry;
CREATE USER 'webtry'@'%' IDENTIFIED BY '<password is in valentine>';
GRANT SELECT, INSERT, UPDATE ON webtry.webtry       TO 'webtry'@'%';
GRANT SELECT, INSERT, UPDATE ON webtry.workspace    TO 'webtry'@'%';
GRANT SELECT, INSERT, UPDATE ON webtry.workspacetry TO 'webtry'@'%';

// If this gets changed also update the sqlite create statement in webtry.go.

CREATE TABLE webtry (
  code      TEXT      DEFAULT ''                 NOT NULL,
  create_ts TIMESTAMP DEFAULT CURRENT_TIMESTAMP  NOT NULL,
  hash      CHAR(64)  DEFAULT ''                 NOT NULL,
  PRIMARY KEY(hash)
);

CREATE TABLE workspace (
  name      CHAR(64)  DEFAULT ''                 NOT NULL,
  create_ts TIMESTAMP DEFAULT CURRENT_TIMESTAMP  NOT NULL,
  PRIMARY KEY(name)
);

CREATE TABLE workspacetry (
  name      CHAR(64)  DEFAULT ''                 NOT NULL,
  create_ts TIMESTAMP DEFAULT CURRENT_TIMESTAMP  NOT NULL,
  hash      CHAR(64)  DEFAULT ''                 NOT NULL,
  hidden    INTEGER   DEFAULT 0                  NOT NULL,

  FOREIGN KEY (name) REFERENCES workspace(name)
);

Common queries webtry.go will use:

INSERT INTO webtry (code, hash) VALUES('int i = 0;...', 'abcdef...');

SELECT code, create_ts, hash FROM webtry WHERE hash='abcdef...';

SELECT code, create_ts, hash FROM webtry ORDER BY create_ts DESC LIMIT 2;

// To change the password for the webtry sql client:
SET PASSWORD for 'webtry'@'%' = PASSWORD('<password is in valentine>');

// Run before and after to confirm the password changed:
SELECT Host, User, Password FROM mysql.user;

Common queries for workspaces:

SELECT hash, create_ts FROM workspace ORDER BY create_ts DESC;

INSERT INTO workspace (name, hash) VALUES('autumn-river-12354', 'abcdef...');

SELECT name FROM workspace GROUP BY name;

Password for the database will be stored in the metadata instance, if the metadata server can't be found, i.e. running locally, then a local sqlite database will be used. To see the current password stored in metadata and the fingerprint:

gcutil  --project=google.com:skia-buildbots    getinstance skia-webtry-b

To set the mysql password that webtry is to use:

gcutil  --project=google.com:skia-buildbots   setinstancemetadata skia-webtry-b --metadata=password:'[mysql client webtry password]' --fingerprint=[some fingerprint]

To retrieve the password from the running instance just GET the right URL from the metadata server:

curl "http://metadata/computeMetadata/v1/instance/attributes/password" -H "X-Google-Metadata-Request: True"

N.B. If you need to change the MySQL password that webtry uses, you must change it both in MySQL and the value stored in the metadata server.

Squid

Squid is configured to run on port 80 and run as an accelerator for the actual Go program which is running on port 8000. The config for the squid proxy is held in sys/webtry_squid, which is copied into place during installation and squid is kept running via monit.

Workspaces

Workspaces are implemented by the workspace and workspacetry tables. The workspace table keeps the unique list of all workspaces. The workspacetry table keeps track of all the tries that have occured in a workspace. Right now the hidden column of workspacetry is not used, it's for future functionality.

Code Editor

CodeMirror is used for rich code editing. The following files are included from the official CodeMirror distribution and can be updated in place (no local customizations):

• codemirror.js - base CM implementation
• codemirror.css - base CM stylesheet
• clike.js - C-like syntax highlighting support

Alternatively, we may consider pulling CM as an external dependency at some point.

Installation

See the README file.