What unshare -n leaves behind: building a boundary for an AI recon agent

7.5 relevance

Building sandbox boundaries for AI recon agents is directly relevant to agent security.

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Why It Matters

For platform engineers building AI agent sandboxes, this highlights a critical blind spot in network namespace isolation—Unix sockets over the filesystem can leak data even when IP networking is fully blocked, which is especially dangerous for CI/CD pipelines running untrusted agents on shared runners.

Key Takeaways

Add a separate mount namespace (unshare -m) or explicitly restrict Unix socket paths when jailing AI agents, and extend isolation tests to cover AF_UNIX sockets beyond just AF_INET.

What unshare -n leaves behind: building a boundary for an AI recon agent

Summary

A bug-bounty AI recon agent jailed via unshare -n (network namespace) still bypassed isolation by connecting to a host Unix socket through the shared filesystem mount namespace, passing 13/13 isolation tests that only checked AF_INET sockets. The fix requires either a separate mount namespace or restricting Unix socket access, as demonstrated by a reproduction using two Python scripts on a disposable Linux environment.

Author

GnomeMan4201