It’s been a busy year for Capsicum, practical capabilities for UNIX, so a year-end update seemed in order:

The FreeBSD Foundation and Google jointly funded a Capsicum Integration Project that took place throughout 2013 — described by Foundation project technical director Ed Maste in a recent blog article. Pawel Jakub Dawidek refined several Capsicum APIs, improving support for ioctls and increasing the number of supported capability rights for FreeBSD 10. He also developed Casper, a helper daemon that provides services (such as DNS, access to random numbers) to sandboxes — and can, itself, sandbox services. Casper is now in the FreeBSD 11.x development branch, enabled by default, and should appear in FreeBSD 10.1. The Google Open Source Program Office (OSPO) blog also carried a September 2013 article on their support for open-source security, featuring Capsicum.

Capsicum is enabled by default in the forthcoming FreeBSD 10.0 release — capability mode, capabilities, and process descriptors are available in the out-of-the-box GENERIC kernel. A number of system services use Capsicum to sandbox themselves — such as the DHCP client, high-availability storage daemon, audit log distribution daemon, but also command-line tools like kdump and tcpdump that handle risky data. Even more will appear in FreeBSD 10.1 next year, now that Casper is available.

David Drysdale at Google announced Capsicum for Linux, an adaptation of Linux to provide Capsicum’s capability mode and capabilities, in November 2013. David and Ben Laurie visited us in Cambridge multiple times this year to discuss the design and implementation, review newer Capsicum APIs, and talk about future directions. They hope to upstream this work to the Linux community. Joris Giovannangeli also announced an adaptation of Capsicum to DragonFlyBSD in October 2013.

Over the summer, Mariusz Zaborski and Daniel Peryolon were funded by Google Summer of Code to work on a variety of new Capsicum features and services, adapting core UNIX components and third-party applications to support sandboxing. For example, Mariusz looked at sandboxing BSD grep: if a vulnerability arises in grep’s regular-expression matching, why should processing a file of malicious origin yield full rights to your UNIX account?

In May 2013, our colleagues at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, led by Bill Harris, published a paper at the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (“Oakland”) on “Declarative, Temporal, and Practical Programming with Capabilities” — how to model program behaviour, and automatically transform some classes of applications to use Capsicum sandboxing. We were very pleased to lend a hand with this work, and feel the art of programming for compartmentalisation is a key research challenge. We also collaborated with folk at SRI and Google on a a workshop paper developing our ideas about application compartmentalisation, which appeared at the Security Protocols Workshop here in Cambridge in March 2013.

Google and the FreeBSD Foundation are committed to further work on Capsicum and its integration with applications, and research continues on how to apply Capsicum at several institutions including here at Cambridge. We hope to kick off a new batch of application adaptation in coming months — as well as integration with features such as DNSSEC. However, we also need your help in adapting applications to use Capsicum on systems that support it!