Now that we’ve deployed the most successful capability language ever, it’s time to start thinking about the rest of the stack, and one end of that stack is the operating system.

Luckily, thinking in this area has been going on a long time – indeed, capabilities were invented in the context of the OS, though for a long time were thought to be the exclusive domain of specialised hardware. Some of that hardware ended up being extremely widely deployed, too, so don’t think this is the stuff of lab experiments only. Sadly, though, despite the hardware supported capabilities, these were not generally exposed up to the level of the kernel/userland interface; they were thought to be useful only within the kernel (with one notable, but not very well known or widely used, exception),

However, more recently it has been realised that capabilities are not only useful in userland, but also can be implemented on top of commodity hardware, resulting in a crop of new capability operating systems. But these still suffer from the problems that traditional capability languages have suffered from: they need the world to be completely reinvented before you can use them. Because the capability paradigm is fundamentally different from the ambient authority ACL-based world we live in, no existing software can fully enjoy the benefits of capabilities without at least some rewriting.

So, the interesting research question has now become: how can we move toward this world without having to rewrite everything on day one? Some progress has been made with mapping POSIX onto capabilities. Heading in a completely different direction is the idea of running existing OSes as guests on a capability system. Yet another approach is to apply capabilities to more restricted domains: one that I have been involved in is the idea of hosting untrusted software “in the cloud”, in the same vein as Google App Engine. Because this software is all new, changing the way it has to work is not a big deal.

But the thing that interests me most is the work being done on FreeBSD, which allows capability-based code to coexist with (or even be contained within) existing POSIX code. This provides a genuine, believably workable, migration path from existing systems to a brave new capability world. We can move one application (or even one library) at a time, without breaking anything. Which is why I am pleased to be able to say I am involved in this work, too. What’s even better is this work is by no means specific to FreeBSD – the same principles could be applied to any POSIX system (so Linux and Mac OS X would be good targets). Just as we have seen success with Caja it seems to me that this route can deliver success at the OS level, because it allows a gradual, piecemeal migration.

Unusually for me, I have not interrupted my narrative flow by naming or saying too much directly about the various things I link to – however, I appreciate that following links in the middle of reading can get distracting, so here are many of the links again with some explanation…

Caja: a capability version of Javascript. I have written about it before.

CAP computer: the project that invented capabilities.

IBM System/38: more capability hardware.

AS/400: derived from the System/38. Although this had capabilities, they were not exposed to userland. Very widely used commercially.

KeyKOS: a commercial capability operating system.

Amoeba: an experimental capability system – like Caja, it tends to advertise its other virtues rather than describing itself as a capability system.

EROS: another experimental capability OS – originally intended to provide robustness, not security. The first to run on a standard PC.

CapROS: when EROS was discontinued, it lived on as CapROS. Google has recently sponsored the development of a web-hosting experiment on top of CapROS.

Coyotos: by the original designer of EROS. Now also discontinued (can you spot a trend here?).

Plash: the Principle of Least Authority Shell. This shell runs on Linux, figures out from the command line what any particular invocation of an executable should have access to, creates a sandbox with access to only those things, then maps POSIX calls onto the sandboxed things.

L4: a modern capability-based microkernel.

L4Linux: Linux running on top of L4. Although this is nice for things like driver isolation, it seems like the wrong direction because it does not assist with exposing capabilities to userland.

FreeBSD Capsicum: a capability mode for FreeBSD. Whole executables can opt in to this mode, coexisting with POSIX binaries. Even more interestingly, libraries can spawn off capability-mode subprocesses whilst effectively remaining in POSIX mode themselves. This allows the transparent implementation of privilege separation. This project has also been sponsored by Google.