[cap-talk] MinorFS Philosophy

[Karp, Alan H]

Rob Meijer wrote:

> And just as with active objects, giving a user only the authority he needs at the time
> he needs it to get his job done should IMO make his job much more simple and thus more
> manageable.

I've been following the discussion but not commenting because something that I couldn't identify bothered me.  I now know what that is.  What is the "user" in the above?  I've been using the term to mean the person and the totality of the permissions that person can use.  These permissions are usually held by a process that is sometimes called the powerbox.  The user expresses what is to be done by telling the powerbox to start a process with a subset of those permissions.

You are saying something different, but I don't understand how that works.  Say the user is doing one task with the least set of rights needed for that job and wishes to start another task that needs a different set of rights.  How does the "user" get the authority needed to do the second task?

________________________
Alan Karp
Principal Scientist
Virus Safe Computing Initiative
Hewlett-Packard Laboratories
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