Is it possible to "freeze" a process entirely into a while and "rehydrate" it on another, different computer ?

[shodan]

Hi,

I am curious if this could be possible to do ?
Of course, I can do this with a virtual machine, free the entire operating system, memory and all, put it into a file, move it to another computer and restore it as if nothing had happened.

But I was wondering if something like Sandboxie could achieve this ?

Usually, the hooks into the operating system are too numerous and cannot be arbitrarily re-created on a new operating system, even if it were of the save version and build.

But maybe, at least for simpler processes it could be possible to achieve this with Sandboxie ?

There is software on linux called CRUI to achieve this

CRIU - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

I was wondering if anything like this could be possible on windows but it does seem far fetched.

 

[bastik-1001]

Hello,

I am not technically involved in Sandboxie nor anything else, so I can't evaluate how feasible this is. I could not find the feature request issue for when a similar question arose. Maybe I failed to find it or, I remembered incorrectly where this question came up.

As far as I remember, David said (or better wrote) that Windows itself does not allow to freeze or suspend a process to storage and restore it to the exact same state. I don't know if that would be the case because Windows itself behaves in a way that Sandboxie couldn't do it, or if Sandboxie itself works in such a way that it can't do it as it relies on Windows functions.

That being said, it could be that some software might be able to do, if that software could work on a really low level, unless Windows can't be forced to restore everything to the state it had to be in.

Sandboxie hooks functions, filters requests by its driver and provides services and denies functionality (e.g. the function won't be emulated, it just fails). Your request appears to require something that goes beyond that, as Sandboxie does not control the memory of a process. (I asked if Sandboxie could encrypt the memory of a sandbox, like when doing banking, so that even if the memory is dumped secrets couldn't be read easily. The answer was that it could not provide something like that since the operating system handles the process memory.)

Thank you for sharing the link, maybe it can be useful for Sandboxie itself, or some other software David is working on. Some things are out of scope for Sandboxie, but David created MajorPrivacy and ShadowFreeze, which cover different use cases.