[cap-talk] Capabilities and LDAP (was Reducing Ambient user authority in a Type Safe /Memory Safe OS.)

[Monty Zukowski]

>> 3) Central Management- This also includes LDAP/AD/NDS tree integration.
>> I still think you must provide this to get company acceptance. Getting
>> people to move to Capabilities is a big enough task with adding social
>> structure changes.
>>
> The problem is that people have conflated authorization decisions and access decisions.  Once people
> understand the difference, they'll see that they can still use LDAP to make authorization decisions and use
> capabilities as the embodiment of those decisions.  For example, users might worry about delegating to
> someone who should not have the right.  You can build a system that uses LDAP to help.

I'm curious to understand what you mean there, how LDAP can be used to help.

For the system we're building, the basic idea is that user info is
stored in LDAP.   We have sets of capabilities called capsets (think
of a folder of bookmarks), and use those in place of groups.  Group
membership just means the user has been given the handle to a specific
capset.

Inside our system, we take the union of the capsets a user has as the
real capset they have to work with.

We haven't implemented our LDAP integration yet, in fact I'm just
learning the details of LDAP from the O'Reilly book righ now.  I would
love to hear more about what LDAP users would be expecting and how to
make our LDAP integration easy to use.

Monty