CAPSICUM(4) | Device Drivers Manual | CAPSICUM(4) |
NAME¶
Capsicum
—
lightweight OS capability and sandbox framework
SYNOPSIS¶
options CAPABILITY_MODE
options CAPABILITIES
DESCRIPTION¶
Capsicum
is a lightweight OS capability and sandbox
framework implementing a hybrid capability system model.
Capsicum
can be used for application and library
compartmentalisation, the decomposition of larger bodies of software into
isolated (sandboxed) components in order to implement security policies and
limit the impact of software vulnerabilities.
Capsicum
provides two core kernel
primitives:
- capability mode
- A process mode, entered by invoking cap_enter(2), in which access to global OS namespaces (such as the file system and PID namespaces) is restricted; only explicitly delegated rights, referenced by memory mappings or file descriptors, may be used. Once set, the flag is inherited by future children processes, and may not be cleared.
- capabilities
- Limit operations that can be called on file descriptors. For example, a file descriptor returned by open(2) may be refined using cap_rights_limit(2) so that only read(2) and write(2) can be called, but not fchmod(2). The complete list of the capability rights can be found in the rights(4) manual page.
In some cases, Capsicum
requires use of
alternatives to traditional POSIX APIs in order to name objects using
capabilities rather than global namespaces:
- process descriptors
- File descriptors representing processes, allowing parent processes to manage child processes without requiring access to the PID namespace; described in greater detail in procdesc(4).
- anonymous shared memory
- An extension to the POSIX shared memory API to support anonymous swap objects associated with file descriptors; described in greater detail in shm_open(2).
SEE ALSO¶
cap_enter(2), cap_fcntls_limit(2), cap_getmode(2), cap_ioctls_limit(2), cap_rights_limit(2), fchmod(2), open(2), pdfork(2), pdgetpid(2), pdkill(2), pdwait4(2), read(2), shm_open(2), write(2), cap_rights_get(3), libcasper(3), procdesc(4)HISTORY¶
Capsicum
first appeared in FreeBSD
9.0, and was developed at the University of Cambridge.
AUTHORS¶
Capsicum
was developed by Robert
Watson
<rwatson@FreeBSD.org>
and Jonathan Anderson
<jonathan@FreeBSD.org>
at the University of Cambridge, and Ben Laurie
<benl@FreeBSD.org> and
Kris Kennaway
<kris@FreeBSD.org> at
Google, Inc., and Pawel Jakub Dawidek
<pawel@dawidek.net>.
July 5, 2016 | Linux 4.9.0-9-amd64 |