Capsicum: practical capabilities for UNIX

  • Authors:
  • Robert N. M. Watson;Jonathan Anderson;Ben Laurie;Kris Kennaway

  • Affiliations:
  • University of Cambridge;University of Cambridge;Google UK Ltd.;Google UK Ltd.

  • Venue:
  • USENIX Security'10 Proceedings of the 19th USENIX conference on Security
  • Year:
  • 2010

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Abstract

Capsicum is a lightweight operating system capability and sandbox framework planned for inclusion in FreeBSD 9. Capsicum extends, rather than replaces, UNIX APIs, providing new kernel primitives (sandboxed capability mode and capabilities) and a userspace sandbox API. These tools support compartmentalisation of monolithic UNIX applications into logical applications, an increasingly common goal supported poorly by discretionary and mandatory access control. We demonstrate our approach by adapting core FreeBSD utilities and Google's Chromium web browser to use Capsicum primitives, and compare the complexity and robustness of Capsicum with other sandboxing techniques.