Trustworthy Systems

capDL: A language for describing capability-based systems

Authors

Ihor Kuz, Gerwin Klein, Corey Lewis and Adam Christopher Walker

NICTA

UNSW

Abstract

Capabilities provide an access control model that can be used to construct systems where safety of protection can be precisely determined. However, in order to be certain of the security provided by such systems it is necessary to verify that their capability distributions do in fact fulfil requirements relating to isolation and information flow, and that there is a direct connection to the actual capability distribution in the system. We claim that, in order to do this effectively, systems need to have explicit descriptions of their capability distributions. In this paper we present the capDL capability distribution language for the capability-based seL4 microkernel. We present the key language features and their motivations, and provide a small example to illustrate the language syntax and semantics.

BibTeX Entry

  @inproceedings{Kuz_KLW_10,
    address          = {New Delhi, India},
    author           = {Kuz, Ihor and Klein, Gerwin and Lewis, Corey and Walker, Adam Christopher},
    booktitle        = {Asia-Pacific Workshop on Systems (APSys)},
    keywords         = {os, security, capabilities, language},
    month            = aug,
    pages            = {31--35},
    paperurl         = {https://trustworthy.systems/publications/nicta_full_text/3679.pdf},
    title            = {{capDL}: A Language for Describing Capability-Based Systems},
    year             = {2010}
  }

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