Catnip helps to build a virtual environment to compile and run untrusted programs safely.

With Catnip, you can run untrusted programs in virtual machines protecting the system from possible attacks like:

• exploiting compiler bugs and executing arbitrary code,
• allocating huge memory to make the system crash,
• writing huge files to local filesystems to run out of disk space,
• issuing fork(2) many times to make the system unstable.

Here are example use cases of Catnip:

• Run continuous integrations in Catnip sandboxes to protect the integration server from crashing accidentally.
• Use Catnip to run and judge submitted programs in public programming contests.

Catnip is not a Google project, but a personal project maintained by Shuhei Takahashi.