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Capabilities are pretty much the only practical way to perform access control on a persistent object store design. External pagers (custom VMM and page fault h
by vezzy-fnord 11y ago
Capabilities are pretty much the only practical way to perform access control on a persistent object store design.
External pagers (custom VMM and page fault handling policy on the per-process, per-task, per-library, etc. level) have been an integral part of all microkernel architectures since Mach, likely earlier on to the Accent and TRIX kernels.
The paper actually cited a reference to an old microarchitecture with capability-based addressing called MONADS-PC. Unfortunately, it seems like the paper is nowhere to be found in public, even though it's cited quite a bit! Instead, there's a shorter and related paper called "The Micro-Architecture of a Capability-Based Computer", but it's not the same one.
- nickpsecurity 11y agoExternal pagers do have a long history in microkernels but I was thinking more on all this "managed code." It's an idea that needs to transfer over more. The container schemes, too, since they're reinventing microkernels. Far as MONADS-PC, that is interesting and might be one of those situations we were talking about with IT gems being locked up. I'll see if I can dig it out.
- nickpsecurity 11y agoThe reason it was only cited was because it was a conference that was published as a whole for $200 and largely out of stock. However, even a wall that big doesn't easily stop a force of nature like Nick P: http://messagelab.monash.edu.au/Publications/DavidAbramson http://messagelab.monash.edu.au/Publications/DavidAbramson Note: Acaddmics and research groups often squirrel away copies on their own sites for self promotion and sometimes public benefit. Summary of the group's work below along with important point that hardware wasn't good enough for software at that point: http://www.monads-security.org http://www.monads-security.org Enjoy. :)