[cap-talk] Confused Deputies in Capability Systems - not

Bill Frantz frantz at pwpconsult.com
Thu Feb 26 23:50:11 EST 2009


marcus.brinkmann at ruhr-uni-bochum.de (Marcus Brinkmann) on Thursday, February 26, 2009 wrote:

>Instead, in a Unix implementation the compile should use suid/sgid mechanism
>and access() to check user-supplied filenames.  That is a robust mechanism to
>solve this problem that is provided by the operating system exactly for this
>use case.

Does this technique work in David-Sarah's example, where the client is
itself a deputy? Quoting:

> - what if the client is itself a deputy? In that case the compiler's
>   check that the client has the necessary permission would succeed,
>   even though the access should be denied unless the client's client
>   also had that permission. Even if (unrealistically) we assume that
>   the compiler were trusted to perform system-level access checks,
>   its client certainly will not be.

Cheers - Bill

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