Re: Microsoft SDL report card

[Ben Laurie <benl () google com>]

On 18 April 2011 18:46, Andy Steingruebl <steingra () gmail com> wrote:
> On Fri, Apr 15, 2011 at 7:33 AM, Ben Laurie <benl () google com> wrote:
> > Which is why I am interested in and devoting most of my time now to
> > capability systems.
>
> Ben,
>
> Is your work focused on the technical bits of this, or the human
> interaction pieces?

In short: both.

>  Seems to me that much of the work on technical
> implementations of capabilities, fine-grained permissions, MAC, etc.
> have been worked out repeatedly over time and we've never come up with
> very usable systems.  Or ones that stay usable over time....

I would contend that actually, we haven't really ever tested usability
because we've never really used these systems except in the lab.

One of the things I'm excited about in our recent work is that we've
started to make progress on hybrid models where capability stuff can
coexist with existing stuff. For example, Caja and FreeBSD Capsicum.

> Try setting the permissions for an application when you install it, or
> figure out whether it is asking for more permissions than it really
> needs, etc?

The underlying problem with these questions right now is that
permissions are expressed in terms of low-level system services (e.g.
file read/write), but actually we should be making decisions at higher
levels where the permission correspond to things the user understands
(e.g. "my account at Google" or "my Flickr photos" or "this album in
Picasa"). Capabilities seem well suited to this level of permission
management.

> Thoughts?
>
> - Andy

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