How does dfinity protect against using many update calls to make canister run out of cycles?

[ulan]

@Jupes_M

Due to its design requirements, Dfinity created their own LLVM for use on the IC, and you better believe that they are tight-lipped when it comes to talking about it. I can’t get anything out of them other than ‘it’s different and was designed to prevent any shell breakout attacks’.

Did you mean canister sandbox, not LLVM here?

LLVM is a toolchain for compiling program that the Rust compiler uses under the hood. I am pretty sure that the Internet Computer source code is compiled using standard Rust, which uses standard LLVM.
I never heard about a custom LLVM for Internet Computer. Forking LLVM to create some custom version of it would be a huge engineering effort and I don’t know what would be the benefit of it.

If you meant canister sandboxing, then there are public resources explaining it:

• Community Conversation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E05ZB4zCTrE&list=PLuhDt1vhGcrez-f3I0_hvbwGZHZzkZ7Ng
• Report of a security audit by Trails of Bits: "Canister Sandbox Review" by Trail of Bits (third-party security audit #4)

Canister sandboxing uses a common technique of process isolation with SELinux. If you have concrete technical questions about it, I’d be happy to answer.