Cover Image
QR Code

A Taste of Capsicum: Practical Capabilities for UNIX.

Capsicum is a lightweight operating system (OS) capability and sandbox framework planned for inclusion in FreeBSD 9. Capsicum extends, rather than replaces, UNIX APIs, providing new kernel primitives (sandboxed capability mode and capabilities) and a userspace sandbox API. These tools support decomp...

Full description

Published in:Communications of the ACM Vol. 55; no. 3; pp. 97 - 105
Format: Article
Published: Association for Computing Machinery Mar2012
Subjects:
Computer operating systems
Unix operating systems
Application program interfaces
Kernel functions
Web browsers
Sandboxes (Computer science)
Online Access:View this record in EBSCOhost
Summary:Capsicum is a lightweight operating system (OS) capability and sandbox framework planned for inclusion in FreeBSD 9. Capsicum extends, rather than replaces, UNIX APIs, providing new kernel primitives (sandboxed capability mode and capabilities) and a userspace sandbox API. These tools support decomposition of monolithic UNIX applications into compartmentalized logical applications, an increasingly common goal that is supported poorly by existing OS access control primitives. We demonstrate our approach by adapting core FreeBSD utilities and Google’s Chromium Web browser to use Capsicum primitives, and compare the complexity and robustness of Capsicum with other sandboxing techniques.