Tag
capabilities
- Sep 14, 2026 Capability Machines and the CHERI Bounds Encoding How a pointer that carries its own bounds and permissions replaces a flat address space, what the compressed bounds cost in bits, and why the model makes spatial safety a hardware property. memory systems
- Aug 5, 2026 Capability References and the Absence of Ambient Authority Why naming a resource by path or file descriptor grants more than the caller needs, and how unforgeable references make authority a property of what a program holds rather than who it claims to be. language runtimes
- Jun 24, 2026 Capabilities and the Decomposition of Root Privilege How the single root check was split into distinct capabilities, how the permitted, effective and inheritable sets interact across execve, and why file capabilities and no_new_privs change the rules. operating systems
- Aug 12, 2025 User Namespaces and the Mapping of UIDs How a process can hold full privilege over a subtree of the process hierarchy while holding none outside it, and what the uid_map translation table does at each syscall boundary. operating systems
- Jul 30, 2025 Object Capabilities and the Confused Deputy How unforgeable references replace identity checks, why ambient authority enables the confused deputy, and what membrane and revocation designs cost in a capability system. security
- May 8, 2025 Permission Grants and Where They Are Enforced How install-time and runtime permission models differ, which layer checks a grant at the moment of use, and why a granted permission can still fail at the call site. mobile computing
- Apr 1, 2025 What a File Descriptor Is: An Index Into a Process Table The descriptor is a small integer indexing a per-process array of pointers, and that indirection explains dup, fork, close, and the shared-offset bugs that follow from each. systems programming
- Jan 14, 2025 Capability Sets and UID Mapping in Rootless Containers How a user namespace turns UID 0 into an unprivileged identity, which capabilities survive the mapping, and why setuid binaries break in ways that look like permission bugs. virtualization
- May 30, 2024 Attenuation and Revocation of Delegated Authority How a capability can be narrowed before it is passed on, why revocation in a capability system is either impossible or requires indirection, and what each indirection costs. language runtimes
- Aug 23, 2023 How Capability Sets Split Root Authority The five capability sets a Linux process carries, the transitions between them at exec, and why dropping a capability is not the same as dropping a file permission. virtualization