Re: Pony talks about Deny Capabilities

Matt Rice <[email protected]> Tue, 12 May 2015 05:36:53 -0700
Newsgroups gmane.comp.capabilities.general
Message-ID <CACTLOFpockU2R+Us3xGR_-uC6QuVi67_BGx-qboi4sy3QvQhXw@mail.gmail.com>
On Mon, May 11, 2015 at 11:14 PM, Sylvan Clebsch <[email protected]> wrote:
> On 12 May 2015 at 05:54, Dan Connolly <[email protected]> wrote:
>>
>> One idea I had when I started looking at rust is: let main programs
>> link to whatever the developer likes, but don't let libraries
>> (including the standard library) link to ambient authority.
>
> This is very interesting.
>
>> while the main program linking to anything is like the privileged scope
>
> I like this. I suspect this is the route to take for Pony.

I was thinking something along these lines as well, except ideally
you'd have something like a shell capability where ambient authority
is isolated (libraries don't get passed a shell cap, program entry
points do, but entry points only can receive caps from the shell),  in
a capability OS with a real cap shell you could imagine taking out the
shell cap entirely and replacing it with the separate shell process...

so the shell can give the main program a capability which calls
connect() without the authority to call connect directly