Messages in this thread | | | Date | Fri, 11 Feb 2000 10:01:19 -0500 (EST) | From | Gregory Maxwell <> | Subject | Re: Capabilities |
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On Fri, 11 Feb 2000 tytso@valinux.com wrote:
[snip] > Well, there's a trade off here. If you could have 32 bits basically > almost right away, and more would take longer, which would you choose? > Also, keep in mind that more bits is not necessarily good. There is a > *huge* complexity cost in maintaining capabilities. People have enough > trouble keeping track of the 12 bits of permissions on a per file > basis. This adds one or two orders of magnitude of more bits for every > executable. [snip]
Figured I peep in here. I'm running a system that makes heavy use of caps. Every daemon is in a chroot jail, every processes that needs more then normal user access, uses capabilities. I've even globally droped some caps (the rawio/blockdevice cap provided by a patch).
I'm very familar with 'the' unix kernel, and lowlevel programming. But even with that knoweldge it was often difficult getting the caps right. Complexity = security holes.
If we go to many more caps, it will be virtually impossible for anyone but gurus to safely use them, and since it's a platform specific thing, I don't know how many applications will use them out of the box.
It might be useful for someone to instrument strace so that it could tell you what caps a bin is using.
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