On 02/13/2013 02:58 PM, Casey Schaufler wrote: >> >> This is exactly the kind of thinking which has led to the capability >> system being so bloody useless. > > The reason the capability system is "bloody useless" is > that no one wants to update the core system applications to > use it in favor of good old fashioned worked for dad and > works for me too superuser. > Because, in large part because a bunch of the capabilities are so close to equivalent to "superuser" that the distinction is meaningless... so why go through the hassle? (This is especially so since it was a *long* time before the filesystem had any notion of capabilities, and so you had to make your app run as root anyway before you could drop the capabilities... and some of the people who tried failed spectacularly and opened up new security holes.) > > I understand that you want capabilities to be associated with > resources. That is *not* what we have, and arguing that its > what we should have is pointless because Linux does not even > have a concept of resources. > OK, fine, call it "activities". This is still distinct from "usage models", and that's where we're just broken. I may look into seeing if there is any sane way we can use the existing API to define hierarchical capabilities, which at least should let us split existing capabilities just like we used capabilities to split root. -hpa -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-efi" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html