Capsicum Object-Capabilities on Linux

This repository is used for the development of Capsicum object capabilities in the Linux kernel.

This functionality is based on:

• the original Capsicum implementation in FreeBSD 9.x, written by Robert Watson and Jonathan Anderson.
• the Linux kernel implementation written by Meredydd Luff in 2012.

The current functionality is based on the 3.11.1 upstream kernel.

Functionality Overview

Capsicum introduces a new kind of file descriptor, a capability, which has a limited set of rights associated with it. Operations on a capability that are not allowed by the associated rights are rejected (with ENOTCAPABLE). New capabilities can only have a subset of the rights of an existing file descriptor/capability.

Capsicum also introduces capability mode, which disables (with ECAPMODE) all syscalls that access any kind of global namespace.

Taken together, these features allow userspace code to effectively sandbox itself, by:

• creating capabilities (with limited rights) to files and sockets that are definitely needed by the process
• closing all other file descriptors
• entering capability mode (which means that new, non-capability, file descriptors can't be opened.

As process management normally involves a global namespace (that of pid_t values), Capsicum also introduces a process descriptor and related syscalls, which allows processes to be manipulated as another kind of file descriptor.

Building

Capsicum support is currently included for x86_64 and user-mode Linux. The configuration parameters that need to be enabled are:

• CONFIG_64BIT: Capsicum support is currently only implemented for 64 bit mode.
• CONFIG_SECURITY: enable Linux Security Module (LSM) support.
• CONFIG_SECURITY_PATH: enable LSM hooks for path operations
• CONFIG_SECURITY_CAPSICUM: enable the Capsicum LSM.
• CONFIG_PROCDESC: enable Capsicum process-descriptor functionality.

User-mode Linux is used for Capsicum testing, and requires the following additional configuration parameters:

• CONFIG_DEBUG_FS: enable debug filesystem.

Testing

The capsicum-linux currently includes test scripts in the tools/testing/capsicum_tests/ directory, although the (user-space) tests themselves are in the separate capsicum-test repository.

These test scripts currently expect specific build configurations (replacing the -j 5 flag with an appropriate parallelization factor for the local machine):

• For user-mode Linux, the kernel should be built with make -j 5 ARCH=um O=`pwd`/build/ linux (i.e. the old-style linux target is required, and the output tree is expect to be under the build/ subdirectory).

• For native Linux (including VMs), the kernel should be built with make -j 5 O=`pwd`/build-native