The Linux machines in MIT&#x27;s computer labs do essentially the same thing. Right after you log in, there&#x27;s a wrapper around your entire X session that union-mounts a tmpfs on top of the root filesystem, puts you in that chroot, and gives you root. It&#x27;s not secure against active malice (and not intended to be, since you have physical access to the machine), but it lets people run `sudo pip install` or `sudo npm install -g` or `sudo make install` or whatever, and it only stays around until they log out.<p>The trouble with root access is that there&#x27;s always a way for active malice to get in. For instance, our approach is trivially vulnerable to loading a kernel module. It&#x27;s possible that something like user namespaces would solve that today.