Hacker News Reader

Is no one going to talk about their capabilities system? That shit looks cool. A compile time permissions system for which resources can be used. I wonder how fool proof that can be made. Are there escape hatches in the form of arbitrary assembly/linking? Could a leftpad module security issue be deterred with this?

View on HN

Yes, any leftpad-like security issue could be mitigated by the fact that you’d need to inject strange capabilities like network access to the leftpad function.

It is assumed this would raise eyebrows from the user of this function. Furthermore if you were to take a “safe” function and replace it with a dodgy one in a later version, the function signature would change and users would need to update their code. So nothing quite so brazen would get past.

Of course if you are mixing in arbitrary assembly/machine code in your binary via linking that might make a syscall and that could potentially be unsafe.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com