Roadmap

[tav]

For those of us excited about Capsicum on Linux, it would be great if you guys could provide some kind of Roadmap or Status Update so we know when to roughly expect it to become stable, and possibly help out on some aspects. Thanks!

+1

I'm all for helping out as well

[daviddrysdale]

I've put an initial version of a status and roadmap document at capsicum-linux.org, feedback welcome.

This post led me to realize that execveat exists on my system :-)

Do you have any ideas about what library might be a good candidate for really demonstrating the usefulness of Capsicum? Personally, I'm interested in exposing capabilities to the user such that there is less trust required when running applications locally. I'd love to be able to tightly sandbox (for instance) web browsers, a JVM application, etc.

[daviddrysdale]

The trophy list from American Fuzzy Lop gives a good selection of target libraries! There are lots of graphics libraries in that list -- code that does complicated things with bits and bytes is hard to do perfectly, and when the code operates on externally-provided data there's always a chance of problems.

On the application side, Chromium is potentially a good example. The original Capsicum work
talks about sandboxing parts of it with Capsicum in just 100 lines of code (although sadly I think those FreeBSD modifications are now rather out of date).

I suspect it was particularly straightforward because Chromium was originally designed with security and privilege separation in mind -- in particular it already uses a variety of different sandboxes on different platforms. Similarly, sandboxing OpenSSH with Capsicum looked to be fairly easy because it too was already designed to be privilege separated and sandboxed.

(A power box is another potentially useful paradigm for getting existing applications to be more capability-based, but it probably involves more extensive changes across the whole system.)