Drop
A rootless Linux sandbox with gVisor support
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I created Drop because I always felt uneasy installing and running third-party programs using my main user account. A single compromised dependency means a full compromise of the system. What is even worse, because I ship software from my computer, a single compromised dependency can lead to compromise of all the users of my software.Containers and VMs are one solution, but for local work, they are often detrimental to productivity. It takes effort to configure a machine with all the tools and configs needed for productive work, but a container or a VM will be stripped of all these tools. This is great for production deployments, where the aim is a reproducible system with minimal dependencies, but can get in the way of productive local work.Drop is language independent, but the workflow is inspired by Python's virtualenv. With virtualenv the environment isolation is only a convention that relies on installed dependencies being good citizens. With Drop the isolation is enforced.Each Drop environment gets its own writable and easily disposable home dir, with only selected config files and dirs from the original home mounted, mostly read-only.Drop uses Linux namespaces for isolation (user, mount, network, PID, IPC, cgroup), doesn't require root and, as an option, uses gVisor user-space kernel, which adds protection against exploiting host kernel vulnerabilities to escape the sandbox.I don't want to make the introductory post too lengthy, but I'm here to answer any questions and give any additional technical details.Note: This is my 3rd submission of the project, the first two did not draw attention. Since then I have added support for gVisor and created a project website to better explain the concept and organize documentation.
HN · launched Sep 22, 2026 · 189 upvotes (top 4%) · 0 views
Niche: code execution sandboxes · 37 launches, 0 in the last 7 days · Explore this niche →
Category and tags
- Horizontal
- Dev tools
- Developer
- Not AI
- Hobby / open-source project
Visit website ↗ Source listing ↗
More like this: all 37 launches in code execution sandboxes →
Could you build this?
No Drop is a systems-level Linux sandbox operating across user, mount, network, and cgroup namespaces with gVisor user-space kernel integration and privilege dropping, requiring deep OS kernel and security engineering expertise.
What it would actually take: Implementation requires systems programming (Rust/C/Go) leveraging Linux namespaces (`unshare`, `clone`), cgroups v2 resource limiting, seccomp filtering, and integration with the gVisor (`runsc`) virtualized kernel runtime. Correctly securing rootless mount propagation and filesystem virtualization without creating privilege escalation vulnerabilities requires specialized operating system security engineering.
Discussion
20 comments analyzed.
Competitors mentioned: bwrap, nono, proot, Substrate, Boxy
Concerns raised: Does not prevent agent from uploading/exfiltrating sensitive files, Cannot run or start containers from the sandbox, AppArmor allowlists on distros like Ubuntu complicate installation, Tarpit space with many shallow or complex solutions
Feature requests: GUI application sandboxing, VM runtime support, Ability to start containers within sandbox
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one : 278 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #18 of 279 (itself plus its competitors, highest first, normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 326 days after the earliest competitor.
- Nucleus · hn · 2026-06-09 · 40 upvotes · similarity 0.53
- BVisor · hn · 2026-02-23 · 24 upvotes · similarity 0.50
- Cygnus · hn · 2026-07-25 · 8 upvotes · similarity 0.50
- Minimal container-like sandbox built from scratch in C · hn · 2025-12-07 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.47
- Vpod · hn · 2026-06-17 · 12 upvotes · similarity 0.46
- FELF · hn · 2026-11-08 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.45
- Linux installer .exe without pendrives (secure-boot compatible) · hn · 2026-04-21 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.45
- podup · ph · 2026-09-07 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.45
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