[cap-talk] Need Challenge Problems (was: Confinement Confusion)

[Mark S. Miller]

Toby Murray wrote:
> Also, the "confinement" term has also been used in the context of 
> criticising unrestricted delegation. In this instance it has been used 
> when talking about the "capability confinement problem" in 
> http://www2.cs.uregina.ca/~pwlfong/Pub/esorics2006.pdf 

I just skimmed that paper, "Discretionary Capability Confinement", by Philip 
Fong. It seemed like he started out standing on some of the right feet, but 
then he lost me. Do you understand this paper? Can you explain it? Anyone?

In particular, is his "Heros and Sidekicks" game an interesting challenge 
problem for language-based security? Can someone state the problem so that we 
could think about meeting the challenge using just pure object-capabilities, 
without any of this fancier type machinery. Or so that we could understand why 
his proposed type machinery helps? Thanks.

What other interesting challenge problems might we find in the literature of 
the other access control schools? We'd like to gather together challenge 
problems for comparing schools, in order to grow a "secure cooperation 
shootout" wiki.

-- 
Text by me above is hereby placed in the public domain

     Cheers,
     --MarkM