[cap-talk] Newbie questions about security

[Jed Donnelley]

On 12/22/2007 2:20 PM, Mathieu Suen wrote:
> 
> On Dec 21, 2007, at 7:08 AM, Jed Donnelley wrote:
>...
>> You might find this recent talk on object capabilities:
>>
>> http://youtube.com/watch?v=EGX2I31OhBE
> 
> Yes, I have already watched that talk.  Very interesting.
> I like the cp  cat example.

I like that example too.  I think it has particular
appeal to programmers and other computer/technical
people.

However, I think the syntax issues (e.g. the
<> characters for piping and just the command line
syntax in general) seem to suggest that there is
more of a challenge than there actually is in
providing an effective user interface for
object manipulation that includes access control.

In fact I believe the typical object oriented
operations in windowing interfaces such as
drag and drop, copy and paste, and other
selection mechanisms can provide a quite
effective object oriented interfaces that
can support access control.  One can think
of an application interface as simply a form
that is filled in (taking non-defaults as
needed) when a user "invokes" a service.
Any needed user management of access control
can be done with the above mentioned
object oriented user interface tools.

I believe the CapDesk demo shows this
effectively.  I believe some such demonstration
should be added to future talks along the
above lines to show how such an object
capability interface to a person can be managed.
Showing only the cp/cat example I think may
make it seem more difficult than it actually is.

--Jed  http://www.webstart.com/jed/