[cap-talk] "ambient authority" on wiki.erights.org

[Karp, Alan H]

Sam Mason wrote:
> 
> I'd go further and say that in this example the entirety of the code
> runs as a single subject and it's therefore not useful to say that we
> have ambient authority---because there's no one there to abuse it.  The
> moment the code has the possibility of taking on the role of more than
> one subject then we should say that use of this Copier class means we
> have a program that uses ambient authority.
>
Although ambient authorities often lead to vulnerabilities, I don't believe that abuse needs to be part of the definition of ambient authority.  The copy example was meant to show a case where ambient authorities cause a problem not related to abuse.

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