Jon Anderson, Ben Laurie, Kris Kennaway, and I were pleased to see prominent mention of Capsicum in the recent FreeBSD 9.0 press release:

Continuing its heritage of innovating in the area of security research, FreeBSD 9.0 introduces Capsicum. Capsicum is a lightweight framework which extends a POSIX UNIX kernel to support new security capabilities and adds a userland sandbox API. Originally developed as a collaboration between the University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory and Google and sponsored by a grant from Google, FreeBSD was the prototype platform and Chromium was the prototype application. FreeBSD 9.0 provides kernel support as an experimental feature for researchers and early adopters. Application support will follow in a later FreeBSD release and there are plans to provide some initial Capsicum-protected applications in FreeBSD 9.1. “Google is excited to see the award-winning Capsicum work incorporated in FreeBSD 9.0, bringing native capability security to mainstream UNIX for the first time,” said Ulfar Erlingsson, Manager, Security Research at Google.

We first wrote about Capsicum, a hybridisation of the capability system security model with POSIX operating system semantics developed with support from Google, in Capsicum: practical capabilities for UNIX (USENIX Security 2010 and ;login magazine). Capsicum targets the problem of operating system support for application compartmentalisation — the restructuring of applications into a set of sandboxed components in order to enforce policies and mitigate security vulnerabilities. While Capsicum’s hybrid capability model is not yet used by the FreeBSD userspace, experimental kernel support will make Capsicum more accessible to researchers and software developers interested in deploying application sandboxing. For example, the Policy Weaving project at the University of Wisconsin has been investigating automated application compartmentalisation in support of security policy enforcement using Capsicum.