Capability-based Security for Redox: Namespace and CWD as capabilities

Hello everyone! I’m Ibuki Omatsu. I’m currently working on the project “Capability-based security for Redox”, graciously funded by NGI Zero Commons and NLnet. In this post, I’ll explain “Namespace management in Userspace” and “CWD as a Capability”. We’ll explore how we reimplemented the namespace that previously was managed by the kernel, and the previously string-based CWD management, using capabilities. You might want to read about Capability-based security if you are unfamiliar with it. A simplified description is that an open file descriptor is a capability, because it identifies a resource and the application’s access rights for that resource. Capability-based security expects that all resources will be accessed starting from a capability.