> not just to be as safe as modern engines, but to be far safer
A worthy goal! However, I'm still concerned. If the project is sufficiently secure without multi-process, adding layers only increases the surface area for attack vectors. Sandboxing not only increases the surface area of your (now) multiple processes, but also introduces the OS layer as an arbiter of communication between them, which we can safely assume does not have memory safety guarantees (though is probably quite hardened).
Of course, the developers would not claim that Servo is "sufficiently secure" right now, especially since (as brson mentioned) it still includes C & C++ source. My point is, sandboxing can be a huge win in terms of security, especially for now; but any complex feature has tradeoffs and the efficacy of those tradeoffs may not continue to hold through the future and should remain open to consideration.
I don't see how a lack of sandboxing would decrease your attack surface, since you need to communicate with the OS somehow. A sandbox just moderates that communication.
I also don't understand "If the project is sufficiently secure without multi-process, adding layers only increases the surface area". The point of layers is that each one needs to be breached in order to craft a full exploit. If one layer is sufficiently secure without multi-process then in the worst case your defense-in-depth is merely redundant, regardless of the attack surface of the remaining layers (though obviously "sufficiently secure" is fairly impossible to prove).
If there is a bug in the mechanism used to ferry messages between the two processes, as that mechanism lives in the kernel, only that one mechanism needs to be breached to attack the computer: sometimes, "layers" are more like a "chain", which are only as strong as the weakest "link". (However, that is much less likely than an issue in the native GUI components, or the apparently non-negligible amount of unsafe C/C++ and JIT'd code used by Servo.)
A worthy goal! However, I'm still concerned. If the project is sufficiently secure without multi-process, adding layers only increases the surface area for attack vectors. Sandboxing not only increases the surface area of your (now) multiple processes, but also introduces the OS layer as an arbiter of communication between them, which we can safely assume does not have memory safety guarantees (though is probably quite hardened).
Of course, the developers would not claim that Servo is "sufficiently secure" right now, especially since (as brson mentioned) it still includes C & C++ source. My point is, sandboxing can be a huge win in terms of security, especially for now; but any complex feature has tradeoffs and the efficacy of those tradeoffs may not continue to hold through the future and should remain open to consideration.