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Sure, and that is basically what sane people do now, but that only works until something needs a security patch that was not provided for the old version, and changing one dependency is likely to cascade so now I am open to supply chain attacks in many dependencies again (even if briefly).

To really run code without trust would need something more like a microkernel that is the only thing in my system I have to trust, and everything running on top of that is forced to behave and isolated from everything else. Ideally a kernel so small and popular and rarely modified that it can be well tested and trusted.

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Virtual machines are that - tiny surfaces to access the host system (block disk device, ...). Which is why virtual machine escape vulnerabilities are quite rare.
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I feel like in some cases we should be using virtual machines. Especially in domains where risk is non-trivial.

How do you change developer and user habits though? It's not as easy as people think.

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