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Cambridge's Capsicum Framework Promises Efficient Security For UNIX/ChromeOS 87

Posted by timothy from the sounds-spicy dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Communications of the ACM is carrying two articles promoting the Capsicum security model developed by Robert Watson (FreeBSD — Cambridge) and Ben Laurie (Apache/OpenSSL, ChromeOS — Google) for thin-client operating systems such as ChromeOS. They demonstrate how Chrome web browser sandboxing using Capsicum is not only stronger, but also requires only 100 lines of code, vs 22,000 lines of code on Windows! FreeBSD 9.0 shipped with experimental Capsicum support, OpenBSD has patches, and Google has developed a Linux prototype." While the ACM's stories are both paywalled, the Capsicum project itself has quite a bit of information online in the form of various papers and a video, as well as links to (BSD-licensed) code and to various subprojects.
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Cambridge's Capsicum Framework Promises Efficient Security For UNIX/ChromeOS More

Cambridge's Capsicum Framework Promises Efficient Security For UNIX/ChromeOS

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  • our first solid metric (Score:5, Funny)

    by Xtifr ( 1323 ) on Saturday February 25, 2012 @08:44PM (#39161281) Homepage

    So, we have our first solid metric: it's 220 times as hard to make Windows secure as it is for BSD or Linux.

    (Xtifr runs and hides before the angry crowd of humorless astroturfers with mod points arrives.) :)

    • one liner is more than enough for any OS....

      >> shutdown

      • one liner is more than enough for any OS....

        >> shutdown

        Win7:
        C:\> shutdown
        Usage: shutdown [/i | /l | /s | r | /g | /a | /p | /h | /e] [/f] ...50 odd lines cut
        C:\>

        MacOS X:
        # shutdown
        shutdown: NOT super-user
        # sudo shutdown
        usage: shutdown [-] [-h [-u] [-n] | -r [-n] | -s | -k] time [warning-message ...]
        #

        Linux:

    • Re:our first solid metric (Score:5, Interesting)

      by TheRaven64 ( 641858 ) on Sunday February 26, 2012 @07:41AM (#39163145) Journal

      So, we have our first solid metric: it's 220 times as hard to make Windows secure as it is for BSD or Linux.

      BSD or Linux? Check the paper [cam.ac.uk]. It took 100 lines of code with Capsicum, 200 with SELinux, 605 with Linux-with-chroot, 11,301 with Linux-with-seccomp and 22,350 with Windows. So (with your metric) it is somewhere between 2 and 10 times as hard to make Windows as secure as Linux and between 2 and 10 times as hard to make Linux as secure as FreeBSD. And the best score for Linux - the SELinux sandbox - requires enabling SELinux which is a massive blob of code and has introduced several of its own security holes in the last couple of years, while Capsicum is much simple and easier to audit.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Xtifr ( 1323 )

        See, to post your fact-filled response, you actually had to RTFA, and you had to take my silly post seriously. To post my silly joke, I only had to read the slashdot summary. I win! :)

        BTW, check your math. It's between 2 and 100 times for Win v Linux, not between 2 and 10. 22,350 is more than 100 times greater than 200. Likewise, it's between 2 and 100 with Linux v BSD. Also, chroot is part of GNU coreutils, so with a stock, vanilla GNU/Linux system, the answer seems to be 605, which means the normal,

  • This sounds like something that could be useful for Android apps.

    • Re:Android? (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 25, 2012 @09:58PM (#39161563)

      It may sound that way, but it doesn't read that way. Perhaps if you stopped listening to articles and read the written words you'd know what they were about.

      Specifically, Capsicum is a Unix (and therefore heavily C- and process-based) framework for sandboxing applications. Android applications, on the other hand, are written in Java and executed on the Dalvik VM. The "process" model is completely different from that of Unix. C applications and modules in Android can only use and link against the NDK, which doesn't expose any operating system interfaces at all. So, again, Capsicum is useless.

      Capsicum also debuted, like, years ago. I doubt it will pick up steam because the necessary underpinnings will never be adopted in the Linux kernel. For one thing, anything which comes from FreeBSD always has to be re-engineered, and usually poorly. It hardly matters that the Capsicum researchers chose FreeBSD as their test bed for probably arbitrary reasons. What matters is that FreeBSD has now infected it.

      Second, there are two interest groups in the Linux community that dictate security frameworks: the SELinux people and the anti-SELinux people. The anti-SELinux folk are already wedded to a host of alternatives. Capsicum will have a cold reception.

      • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

        by PatPending ( 953482 )

        Capsicum also debuted, like, years ago.

        And appears to be stale:

        The website hasn't been updated since 2010.

        The latest GitHub [github.com] code is from 2010.

        The "Documentation and Publications [cam.ac.uk]" are from 2009 and 2010

        • Re: (Score:1)

          by Anonymous Coward

          Capsicum also debuted, like, years ago.

          And appears to be stale:

          The website hasn't been updated since 2010.

          The latest GitHub [github.com] code is from 2010.

          The "Documentation and Publications [cam.ac.uk]" are from 2009 and 2010

          So stale it got imported into the base system and kernel newest release of FreeBSD.

          Besides, they've proven the system works, what else is really needed? It will take time to change userland utilities to use it, and only at that point will there perhaps be a need to add more capabilities for use cases that may not have been thought of. As it is, I'd be hard pressed to think of a program more complicated than a web browser (network, disk, IPC, and UI access all needed in varying degrees).

        • Re: (Score:1)

          by Anonymous Coward

          Looks like their web site got updated after this article got posted: http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/research/security/capsicum/ -- they have working group slides from October 2011, and news flashes from both January and February 2012, including Communications of the ACM articles are definitely from 2012! However, it sounds like the hard part is yet to come -- getting APIs into operating systems is the beginning, not the end, of the story.

        • Re:Android? (Score:5, Informative)

          by TheRaven64 ( 641858 ) on Sunday February 26, 2012 @07:44AM (#39163155) Journal

          Disclaimer: I am a FreeBSD developer, and was visiting cl.cam.uk last week.

          Capsicum is very much under active development. It's being used in Cambridge in several projects, funded by DARPA and Google. It is no longer developed on github because it is now merged upstream into FreeBSD. As TFS said, it is part of FreeBSD 9, and the core FreeBSD utilities are slowly being modified to use it (it's easy to incrementally deploy capsicum). If you want up to date documentation, check the man pages.

      • C applications and modules in Android can only use and link against the NDK, which doesn't expose any operating system interfaces at all.

        I doubt it will pick up steam because the necessary underpinnings will never be adopted in the Linux kernel.

        And, of course, a good concept with an incompatible implementation could never, ever be reimplemented to work on a different operating system or programming language.

        • C applications and modules in Android can only use and link against the NDK, which doesn't expose any operating system interfaces at all.

          I doubt it will pick up steam because the necessary underpinnings will never be adopted in the Linux kernel.

          And, of course, a good concept with an incompatible implementation could never, ever be reimplemented to work on a different operating system or programming language.

          The point is that if you are programming in java, you can offer arbitrary security models to applications running inside the VM, without the need for any special operating system support. The hard part is enriching the security model in a useful and backwards-compatible way for applications that run natively on the hardware, which is what capsicum does.

          • Re: (Score:3)

            by tal197 ( 144614 )
            The Java equivalent of Capsicum is Joe-E: http://code.google.com/p/joe-e/ [google.com]

          • The point is that if you are programming in java, you can offer arbitrary security models to applications running inside the VM, without the need for any special operating system support

            This is true if and only if your JVM is 100% bug free. Do a CVE search for JVM, Flash, or JavaScript to see how likely that is. With Capsicum, the JVM can restrict itself to the capabilities that the Java code should have, so even if the VM itself is compromised, the Java code can't escape from the sandbox.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by bgat ( 123664 )

        Android applications, on the other hand, are written in Java and executed on the Dalvik VM. The "process" model is completely different from that of Unix.

        First sentence is true, second one isn't. To wit, Android Activity classes run under Dalvik, which itself runs as an ordinary Linux process. Moreover, Android makes extensive use of the Linux process model as part of its security system.

        You don't escape the Linux process model simply by wrapping a large application framework like Android around your code. The only way to escape the Linux process model is to not run as a Linux process e.g. run in kernel space.

      • For one thing, anything which comes from FreeBSD always has to be re-engineered, and usually poorly. It hardly matters that the Capsicum researchers chose FreeBSD as their test bed for probably arbitrary reasons. What matters is that FreeBSD has now infected it.

        God forbid they release and modify truly free code that can be taken and be further modified, then sold without risk of litigation from the original author* If anything, unless I missed the sarcasm, I think it was wise to not infect the project with GPL or taint it early by trying to make it compatible with everything maintained seperately rather then a single released package that is FreeBSD. The poor re-engineering is what makes L \edd\eiWere you trying to be flamebait there?!

      • Android applications get almost no shielding from the OS and filesystem. security separation is based on UID and file system permissions. Since most apps are seriously lacking in file system permissions (app developers just turn on permissions for everyone, so their app works) and things like immutable files and ACLs aren't used, in practice Android is about as safe as an unpatched Windows ME machine directly connected to the Internet (slightly exaggerated for theatrical purposes). I wouldn't trust my comp

      • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

        by Anonymous Coward

        How does something like this get modded up? OP know exactly two things here, jack and shit.

        First, any trivial amount of searching would reveal that Robert Watson, author of Capsicum, is pretty much the FreeBSD project lead, and has been for a very long time. His reasons weren't arbitrary, this is a technology deliberately designed for FreeBSD. This is also not the same as SELinux. Robert Watson already wrote that 10 years ago when he worked on TrustedBSD. This is application level sandboxing, not system lev

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Chrisq ( 894406 )

        It may sound that way, but it doesn't read that way. Perhaps if you stopped listening to articles and read the written words you'd know what they were about.

        Specifically, Capsicum is a Unix (and therefore heavily C- and process-based) framework for sandboxing applications. Android applications, on the other hand, are written in Java and executed on the Dalvik VM. The "process" model is completely different from that of Unix. C applications and modules in Android can only use and link against the NDK, which doesn't expose any operating system interfaces at all. So, again, Capsicum is useless.

        Capsicum also debuted, like, years ago.

        I agree this will add nothing at an app level. However if it is sufficiently lightweight and powerful in could conceivably be used at an OS level below the Dalvic JVM,

  • Apps hard to secure... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 25, 2012 @09:37PM (#39161513)

    The paper goes to great length to point out that applications can only be as secure as the operating system lets them. In section 5 of the A Taste of Capsicum: Practical Capabilities for UNIX paper the authors talk about how Chrome has been secured in all the major operating systems. They succulently sum up the great lengths Google has gone to, to make Chrome secure. Then promptly shoot holes in each of the approach's. Windows gets the worst treatment (lack of capabilities), followed by Linux (complicated approach's.) The authors give the best marks to FreeBSD and then to the Mac OS X MAC implementation.

    The point I took away from the paper was, who ever has the most complete and easiest to implement sandbox (MAC, DAC) implementation to take advantage of can have the most secure applications. But at the end of the day its still up to the developer to take advantage of those capabilities.

    • But at the end of the day its still up to the developer to take advantage of those capabilities.

      True, although there are some ways around this. For example, you can quite easily with capscium create an application launcher that opens a set of file descriptors and then execs an untrusted application. It's also relatively easy to integrate this functionality into a filesystem browser or application launcher, so if you try to run an application that is not on a whitelist it will run it in a sandbox. This is likely to appear by default around FreeBSD 10.0.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Windows has capabilities, they are called policies.
      http://support.microsoft.com/kb/310791

      And since Windows 7, AppLocker is also available,
      http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd723678%28WS.10%29.aspx

  • So we'll start measuring security (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    ...in Scoville Units ? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scoville_scale [wikipedia.org]

    • So we'll start measuring security in Scoville Units

      And we will colloquially refer to the various levels as "Baby," "Posh," "Ginger," "Sporty," (and my personal favorite) "Scary".

  • Tear down the paywall (Score:4, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 25, 2012 @10:15PM (#39161631)

    Here you go:

    The Benets of Capability-based Protection
    http://i.minus.com/1330308329/L4NpiCEFGVpDC5cIaD-oaA/dIgD7OB2SWXbD.pdf

    A Taste of Capsicum: Practical Capabilities for UNIX
    http://i.minus.com/1330308331/bOoWdETijD2_Eye5VsAKPQ/dvW7Ri9ZpoDDi.pdf

    -- Not Aaron Swartz

  • Capsicum mostly dead (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    As far as I know, Capsicum has mostly run its course and been superseded by other umbrellas, particularly CTSRD. The page for the latter [cam.ac.uk] even refers to the former as a 'success project'.

    • success project

      Obligatory [diylol.com]

    • Not really. CTSRD (pronounced 'custard') is a related project. It involves a custom MIPS-based chip and will be using capsicum as a benchmark. The aim is to see how systems like capsicum could be improved by adding some hardware support. Capsicum itself is largely finished as a research project, but that doesn't mean it's dead, quite the reverse. It's now shipped in the standard FreeBSD 9 install and it's being used outside the lab. There is still some Capsicum-related research going on, but this is l

  • It seems to me that a capability model is the right solution.

    Current OS access methods are woefully primitive and difficult to manage. To take two examples:

    1) If you can write a file, you can make an executable

    On windows, notepad can save a file as foo.exe, and you have an executable. On linux it's different but just as simple.

    Very few programs actually need the capability to generate executables (the compiler, and the application installer, for instance). Allowing any and all programs to make executables a

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by khb ( 266593 )

      Finally? Multics and others had such features before the birth on Unix.
      Ecclesiastes 1:10 Is there anything of which one can say, "Look! This is something new"? It was here already, long ago; it was here before our time.

      I prefer the original Hebrew

    • Comment removed based on user account deletion

      • If you only mean that applications shouldn't be allowed to name their files "*.exe" then yes, that would certainly be possible, but that wouldn't solve the problem. Especially on non-Windows platforms where filename doesn't determine whether or not a file is executable.

        So you control which applications can set the "executable" flag.

        e.g. applications shouldn't just be able to even get a directory listing on the user's files unless the user specifically allows for that

        The problem is that this means any app that wants to access any data needs to ask for permission to do so. I don't see how prompting users for permission for every app that wants permission will help. I expect most apps to require at least the ability to read and write their own files to a location the users has access to from other apps, and properly managing which files/directories which apps can access seems to me like it would become incred

        • Comment removed based on user account deletion

        • The problem is that this means any app that wants to access any data needs to ask for permission to do so. I don't see how prompting users for permission for every app that wants permission will help.

          There are basically three things that most apps need to access. Shared libraries, a scratch location, and user documents. Shared libraries are stored in the binary and rtld can grant access to them. A scratch location is easy - every application can be granted access to /tmp/{app name} or similar. User documents are easy to pass in from another process. You invoke the standard file chooser and it runs in an external process and gives you a file descriptor for the selected location.

          The important thi

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by hvdh ( 1447205 )

        On windows, notepad can save a file as foo.exe, and you have an executable.

        That's a rather bad example. Go ahead, open some executable file in notepad and save it, then try to run it, what do you get? Yes, that's right, it's totally corrupt. I do actually get your point, but notepad cannot do what you claim.

        Actually, there is some trick which allows to convert arbitrary machine code (.com, not .exe) to plain readable ASCII text.
        Even changes in whitespace or line breaks will not hinder proper execution.

        groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.asm.x86/browse_thread/thread/26a8ff035a6d81e0/e05e157df731963b?lnk=gst

    • On windows, notepad can save a file as foo.exe, and you have an executable.

      No, you don't. Try to run that.

  • I wouldn't call ChromeOS as Thinclient OS as the same Linux operating system there is running as all popular Linux distributions and what is available for everyone from kernel.org.

    Even that ChromeOS only offers to user a web browser (simplifying), it does not mean the operating system is for thinclients.

    And even that web browser loads all "web apps" from network, it does not mean system is thinclient. Or otherwise I am typing this on thinclient what is really thin, as it is just 3.5cm thin and weights under

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