@initminal/run

Safely execute untrusted code with ESM syntax support, dynamic injection of ESM modules from URL or plain JS code, and granular access control based on whitelisting for each JS object.

Features

• ESM syntax: untrusted code can use import and export module syntax
• Dynamic ESM module injection: easily inject modules dependencies from data: or http(s) URLs, or just plain JS code string
• Granular access control: untrusted code has access only to whitelisted JS objects
• Isomorphic: compatible with both browsers and Node.js
• Queue: evaluations are automatically queued
• Fast: leverage native import() syntax for code evaluation
• Non-blocking: run code inside a module worker, off the main thread
• Always terminable: terminate long running code at any time

Get Started

To install:

npm i --save @initminal/run

Usage

Create an evaluator and execute JS code:

const InitminalRun = createInitminalRun()
const result = await InitminalRun.run("export const initminal = 'hello world'")
console.log(result)
// hello world

Demo

Try it out in the playground

Documentation

Check out the documentation.

📢 Notice

• 🎉 Firefox support:
  • Previous Firefox versions lacked the implementation of dynamic import() in workers, which this library requires.
  • However, the Implement Dynamic import for workers fix has been completed and is scheduled for release in version 113.
• 🧪 Experimental status: this project is still considered unstable and breaking changes may occur (but only when unavoidable).

🔒 Security

• The security of code evaluation using this library depends on the set of whitelisted JS objects.
• The default list of accessible JS objects (subject to updates) should be considered safe for untrusted code.
• IO objects such as fetch or indexedDB are NOT whitelisted by default. Untrusted code can access to host's data if they are manually whitelisted.
• If you must use one or more I/O objects, consider combining another strategy, e.g. executing in an iframe sandbox.
• in the future, proxy support for I/O actions might be implemented as a feature to enable safe I/O operations from untrusted code (contributions are welcome!).

📝Todos:

• Proxies for objects (e.g. fetch), to enable secure I/O operations.
• Typescript support
• Worker pool
• Support other evaluation strategies, such as using WASM, other programming languages
• ...feel free to suggests any new ideas!

Contributions are welcome!

Acknowledgement

• the approach of whitelisting JS objects in a web worker of executing untrusted code takes notes from the blog post Executing untrusted JavaScript code in a browser by Avatar Gérald Barré
• using import() as an alternative to eval() to execute JS code takes notes from the blog post Evaluating JavaScript code via import() by Dr. Axel Rauschmayer