On Sun, Sep 26, 2010 at 08:48:45PM -0400, Perry E. Metzger wrote: > They did Chrome in the paper, and it required very few lines of code > (under 100). They did other tests too. It appears that they've had > quite a bit of success in creating a very usable API here. I'm not > entirely surprised, given the nature of what they're doing.
Just a little historical remark. I am little puzzled why Watson et. al. did not bother to mention Linux capabilities that have existed for a long time. The Linux API is almost identical to the one proposed in the "capsicum" paper. And yet, Linux capabilities are seldom used. Perhaps a general perception would be that somehow these capabilities slided to sidetracks from the very beginning. One probable cause for this was that the vendor-independent committee that started the whole thing was unable to provide something that could have become an actual standard across UNIX platforms and their derivatives. The result was only a draft POSIX document, IEEE 1003.1e, released in 1997, which is considered a failure by many. Maybe there is something to learn from here. - Jukka.
