Verifying the sandbox is engaged

The sandbox engages automatically for every gate. There’s no setup or permission prompt. If a gate’s lockdown fails, the renderer aborts rather than running unprotected (we call this fail-closed).

TheGates doesn’t yet show a visible “sandbox: on” indicator per gate. If you want to confirm engagement for a specific gate, the launcher writes detailed logs you can inspect.

Open the log

1. Inside the launcher, press F12 to open the Debug Log window.
2. Near the bottom, find the line Logs written to ... and click the path to open the log file in your default editor.

The log captures everything from the gate’s startup, including the sandbox engagement. The sandbox markers are hard to miss. Look for the “lockdown engaged” line and the SANDBOX-DIAG block near the top of the file.

Engineering verification

The TheGates engineering team runs an autotest harness that exercises every sandbox engagement path on every supported platform, including negative tests that force each sandbox step to fail and confirm the renderer aborts. The harness lives in the engine repository.

If you find a way to launch a gate where the sandbox isn’t engaged, or a way to break out of an engaged sandbox without a kernel bug, that’s worth a security report. Email nordup.ondr@gmail.com with a reproducer. Subject line [TheGates security] so it doesn’t get lost.

See also