Rainbow

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Rainbow implements the isolation shell implicitly described in the Bitfrost security specification. This means that it isolates activities (and eventually system services) that it is asked to run from one another and the rest of the system.

Rainbow implements this isolation by generating a new uid (and perhaps a new gid) for each program it is asked to run. Running each activity as a separate user means that standard Unix access checks can be used as the primary 'gate' to control the visibility of activity-driven side-effects like reading from or writing to files or devices or signalling other processes.

Finally, "rainbow" is also the name of the build branch into which this isolation shell is being integrated.

Installing

To install Rainbow, either directly install a build from the Rainbow build branch or use the network updater to migrate to a build from that branch.

 # olpc-update rainbow-NNN

Resources

• Taste the Rainbow: A guided tour of the source code of the rainbow-0.7.0 release.
• OLPC Bitfrost: Bitfrost Spec
• README - A description of the scope and design of Rainbow.
• Notes - Useful notes on design and hurdles in developing Rainbow.
• Rainbow/DataStore Access