Does luau use any environment variables?

[ospfranco]

Hi! Thank you so much for this package, this is powering a lot of functionality in our project. We are now having an issue and not sure how to solve it.

Part of our business case is running luau on a server. However, we have some stringent requirements to prove what the server is running because of transparency reasons. In order to achieve this we are using Intel's SGX technology. To make a long story short, one needs to compile the Rust code inside an SGX machine and a hash (called mr_enclave) is generated. This hash is basically a snapshot of the binary code, memory pages and environment flags (which also need to be whitelisted to generate a stable hash).

We just started integrating luau into the server but when we tried deploying it we were faced with non-matching mr_enclave hashes between machines. The moment we call initialize a luau environment the generated hashes are different. We only faced this ourselves once, when we were using a non-whitelisted env variable, which caused the hash values to differ between machines. It could also be an issue with the memory pages.

We would really appreciate if you have any tips/pointers at what could be going on or if there are any environment flags that the luau might be using (after compilation, we are using a static lib)?

Thanks for the help!

[vegorov-rbx]

Hello!
Sorry for the delay, this topic goes outside what I have experience with.

Luau doesn't use environment variables, so if there are other limitations of enclaves it must be something else.

Note that lua_newstate performs memory allocation during initialization through the provided allocation function (or malloc if luaL_newstate is used).
That will result in different memory states if the allocation addresses are different on different machines (it is very likely they are if special care is not taken).