When we talk about “Sandboxing”, we are not referring to the sandpits that children play in at the park, but sandboxes for software. These sandboxes have a pivotal purpose: to prevent the spread of an attack.
In IT, a sandbox is a virtual environment where applications can be executed without any adverse effects on systems that are in operation. This makes it safer to study how an unknown application behaves. It can be used at any time and in any situation to examine files or code which could be harmful before access to the device is allowed.
Sandboxing is often used as part of a suite of antivirus tools, where unknown files are run in such a closed environment in order to observe how they behave. Sandboxing is an important aspect of cybersecurity strategies and adds an extra layer of security which analyses threats and keeps them away from the network. It enables your IT team to test code and understand how it works. Throughout the process, the potential threats are kept isolated from both the computer and the corporate network.
If the presence of malicious software is detected, the antivirus software will notify the user and place the file in quarantine. E-mail attachments and files downloaded via the browser are often analysed in this way. Browsers normally also run websites through a sandbox to prevent malicious program code in the website from accessing the user's system. Apps on iOS and Android also run in their own sandboxes, preventing them from accessing each other's services and information.
Sandboxing is an important concept linked to modern software architecture and agile methods. As a result, it is always part of our approach as regards implementing the following, for example: Microservice Architecture, Data Mesh, Test-Driven Design, Containerised Systems, etc.
Examples of some of the tools we have used in order to offer and support a "sandbox experience" include: Hashicorp Vagrant, Docker Compose, Kubernetes, Virtualization, etc.