From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: bakul at bitblocks.com (Bakul Shah) Date: Thu, 30 Jan 2020 13:51:03 -0800 Subject: [COFF] The MOO problem and set-uid In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On Jan 30, 2020, at 12:25 PM, Dave Horsfall wrote: > > Thanks, all, for the responses; it was driving me nuts! I know the game as "cows and bulls" (or perhaps that's because I'm of British origin). > > I like Dennis' observation: "On the other hand, suid these days seems to be a fairly blunt and dangerous instrument". I've often believed that if you thought you needed set-uid (esp. to root!) you can probably get away with set-gid instead. Capabilities[1] (Dennis, Van Horn, 1966) would have solved the MOO problem. And the CAP computer project had already started in Cambridge! [1] https://www.princeton.edu/~rblee/ELE572Papers/Fall04Readings/ProgramSemantics_DennisvanHorn.pdf Re-reading this papers decades later it is interesting to see that the modern object caps are basically not very different from the original concept! Also interesting to see fork() here.