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Capability-based Security
Capability-based security is a concept in the design of secure computing systems, one of the existing security models. A capability (known in some systems as a key) is a communicable, unforgeable token of authority. It refers to a value that references an object along with an associated set of access rights. A user program on a capability-based operating system must use a capability to access an object. Capability-based security refers to the principle of designing user programs such that they directly share capabilities with each other according to the principle of least privilege, and to the operating system infrastructure necessary to make such transactions efficient and secure. Capability-based security is to be contrasted with an approach that uses traditional UNIX permissions and Access Control Lists. Although most operating systems implement a facility which resembles capabilities, they typically do not provide enough support to allow for the exchange of capabilities amo ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Computer Security
Computer security, cybersecurity (cyber security), or information technology security (IT security) is the protection of computer systems and networks from attack by malicious actors that may result in unauthorized information disclosure, theft of, or damage to hardware, software, or data, as well as from the disruption or misdirection of the services they provide. The field has become of significance due to the expanded reliance on computer systems, the Internet, and wireless network standards such as Bluetooth and Wi-Fi, and due to the growth of smart devices, including smartphones, televisions, and the various devices that constitute the Internet of things (IoT). Cybersecurity is one of the most significant challenges of the contemporary world, due to both the complexity of information systems and the societies they support. Security is of especially high importance for systems that govern large-scale systems with far-reaching physical effects, such as power distribution, ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Handle (computing)
In computer programming, a handle is an abstract reference to a resource that is used when application software references blocks of memory or objects that are managed by another system like a database or an operating system. A resource handle can be an opaque identifier, in which case it is often an integer number (often an array index in an array or "table" that is used to manage that type of resource), or it can be a pointer that allows access to further information. Common resource handles include file descriptors, network sockets, database connections, process identifiers (PIDs), and job IDs. PIDs and job IDs are explicitly visible integers; while file descriptors and sockets (which are often implemented as a form of file descriptor) are represented as integers, they are typically considered opaque. In traditional implementations, file descriptors are indices into a (per-process) file descriptor table, thence a (system-wide) file table. Comparison to pointers While a p ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Tahoe-LAFS
Tahoe-LAFS (Tahoe Least-Authority File Store) is a free and open, secure, decentralized, fault-tolerant, distributed data store and distributed file system. It can be used as an online backup system, or to serve as a file or Web host similar to Freenet, depending on the front-end used to insert and access files in the Tahoe system. Tahoe can also be used in a RAID-like fashion using multiple disks to make a single large Redundant Array of Inexpensive Nodes (RAIN) pool of reliable data storage. The system is designed and implemented around the "principle of least authority" (POLA), described by Brian Warner (one of the project's original founders) as the idea "that any component of the system should have as little power of authority as it needs to get its job done". Strict adherence to this convention is enabled by the use of cryptographic capabilities that provide the minimum set of privileges necessary to perform a given task by asking agents. A RAIN array acts as a storage v ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Capsicum (Unix)
Capsicum is an implementation of capability-based security for UNIX and similar systems. Presented at USENIX 2010, the system is part of FreeBSD since its 9.0 release. It has also been adapted to Linux and DragonflyBSD in the form of kernel patches. The system works by chunking the normal permissions up into very small pieces. When a process enters capsicum mode, it loses all permissions normally associated with its controlling user, with the exception of "capabilities" it already has in the form of file descriptors. A process can also receive capabilities via Unix sockets. These file descriptors not only control access to the file system, but also to other devices like the network sockets. Flags are also used to control more fine-grained access like reads and writes. CloudABI CloudABI is an application binary interface based on capsicum. It keeps the overall capsicum permission model, but uses it to redesign a simplified environment for processes (system calls, C library, etc. ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Flex Machine
The Flex Computer System was developed by Michael Foster and Ian Currie of Royal Signals and Radar Establishment (RSRE) in Malvern, England, during the late 1970s and 1980s. It used a tagged storage scheme to implement a capability architecture, and was designed for the safe and efficient implementation of strongly typed procedures. The hardware was custom and microprogrammable, with an operating system, (modular) compiler, editor, garbage collector and filing system all written in ALGOL 68RS. There were (at least) two incarnations of Flex, implemented using hardware with writable microcode. The first was supplied by Logica to an RSRE design, and the second used an ICL PERQ. The microcode alone was responsible for storage allocation, deallocation and garbage collection. This immediately precluded a whole class of errors arising from the misuse (deliberate or accidental) of pointers. A notable feature of Flex was the tagged, write-once filestore. This allowed arbitrary code ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Serialization
In computing, serialization (or serialisation) is the process of translating a data structure or object state into a format that can be stored (e.g. files in secondary storage devices, data buffers in primary storage devices) or transmitted (e.g. data streams over computer networks) and reconstructed later (possibly in a different computer environment). When the resulting series of bits is reread according to the serialization format, it can be used to create a semantically identical clone of the original object. For many complex objects, such as those that make extensive use of references, this process is not straightforward. Serialization of object-oriented objects does not include any of their associated methods with which they were previously linked. This process of serializing an object is also called marshalling an object in some situations. The opposite operation, extracting a data structure from a series of bytes, is deserialization, (also called unserialization or un ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Orthogonal Persistence
In computer science, persistence refers to the characteristic of state of a system that outlives (persists more than) the process that created it. This is achieved in practice by storing the state as data in computer data storage. Programs have to transfer data to and from storage devices and have to provide mappings from the native programming-language data structures to the storage device data structures. Picture editing programs or word processors, for example, achieve state persistence by saving their documents to files. Orthogonal or transparent persistence Persistence is said to be "orthogonal" or "transparent" when it is implemented as an intrinsic property of the execution environment of a program. An orthogonal persistence environment does not require any specific actions by programs running in it to retrieve or save their state. Non-orthogonal persistence requires data to be written and read to and from storage using specific instructions in a program, resulting in ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Security Hole
Vulnerabilities are flaws in a computer system that weaken the overall security of the device/system. Vulnerabilities can be weaknesses in either the hardware itself, or the software that runs on the hardware. Vulnerabilities can be exploited by a threat actor, such as an attacker, to cross privilege boundaries (i.e. perform unauthorized actions) within a computer system. To exploit a vulnerability, an attacker must have at least one applicable tool or technique that can connect to a system weakness. In this frame, vulnerabilities are also known as the attack surface. Vulnerability management is a cyclical practice that varies in theory but contains common processes which include: discover all assets, prioritize assets, assess or perform a complete vulnerability scan, report on results, remediate vulnerabilities, verify remediation - repeat. This practice generally refers to software vulnerabilities in computing systems. Agile vulnerability management refers preventing attacks by ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Confused Deputy Problem
In information security, a confused deputy is a computer program that is tricked by another program (with fewer privileges or less rights) into misusing its authority on the system. It is a specific type of privilege escalation. The confused deputy problem is often cited as an example of why capability-based security is important. Capability systems protect against the confused deputy problem, whereas access control list-based systems do not. Example In the original example of a confused deputy, there was a compiler program provided on a commercial timesharing service. Users could run the compiler and optionally specify a filename where it would write debugging output, and the compiler would be able to write to that file if the user had permission to write there. The compiler also collected statistics about language feature usage. Those statistics were stored in a file called "(SYSX)STAT", in the directory "SYSX". To make this possible, the compiler program was given permissi ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Kernel (computer Science)
The kernel is a computer program at the core of a computer's operating system and generally has complete control over everything in the system. It is the portion of the operating system code that is always resident in memory and facilitates interactions between hardware and software components. A full kernel controls all hardware resources (e.g. I/O, memory, cryptography) via device drivers, arbitrates conflicts between processes concerning such resources, and optimizes the utilization of common resources e.g. CPU & cache usage, file systems, and network sockets. On most systems, the kernel is one of the first programs loaded on startup (after the bootloader). It handles the rest of startup as well as memory, peripherals, and input/output (I/O) requests from software, translating them into data-processing instructions for the central processing unit. The critical code of the kernel is usually loaded into a separate area of memory, which is protected from access by applicati ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
POSIX Capabilities
The Portable Operating System Interface (POSIX) is a family of standardization, standards specified by the IEEE Computer Society for maintaining compatibility between operating systems. POSIX defines both the system- and user-level application programming interfaces (APIs), along with command line Unix shell, shells and utility interfaces, for software compatibility (portability) with variants of Unix and other operating systems. POSIX is also a trademark of the IEEE. POSIX is intended to be used by both application and system developers. Name Originally, the name "POSIX" referred to IEEE Std 1003.1-1988, released in 1988. The family of POSIX standards is formally designated as IEEE 1003 and the ISO/IEC standard number is International Organization for Standardization, ISO/International Electrotechnical Commission, IEC 9945. The standards emerged from a project that began in 1984 building on work from related activity in the ''/usr/group'' association. Richard Stallman suggested ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
POSIX
The Portable Operating System Interface (POSIX) is a family of standards specified by the IEEE Computer Society for maintaining compatibility between operating systems. POSIX defines both the system- and user-level application programming interfaces (APIs), along with command line shells and utility interfaces, for software compatibility (portability) with variants of Unix and other operating systems. POSIX is also a trademark of the IEEE. POSIX is intended to be used by both application and system developers. Name Originally, the name "POSIX" referred to IEEE Std 1003.1-1988, released in 1988. The family of POSIX standards is formally designated as IEEE 1003 and the ISO/IEC standard number is ISO/IEC 9945. The standards emerged from a project that began in 1984 building on work from related activity in the ''/usr/group'' association. Richard Stallman suggested the name ''POSIX'' (pronounced as ''pahz-icks,'' as in ''positive'', not as ''poh-six'') to the IEEE instead of former ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
