Definition
Plain language
Getting out of the fenced-off box a program was supposed to stay inside, and onto the real machine.
As stated in the literature
Breaking host isolation from inside a container, typically by abusing over-granted capabilities, exposed sockets, or writable host mounts rather than by defeating the kernel itself.
Also called: container escapes, escape the container
Why it matters: An escape turns a problem confined to one sandboxed program into a problem for every other tenant on the same machine, which is why the fence's exact configuration matters more than the fact that there is a fence.
For example, a container handed a writable path to the host's filesystem can quietly overwrite a startup script and end up running commands as the real machine's administrator.
Heard on the show
“… The full write-up is sitting at paperdive dot AI, with every term from this one — tokenizer, container escape, baseboard management controller — tappable for a plain definition, and linked out to related …”Episode 272 — How a Model Guesses Which Engine Is Running It, From a Wrong Date