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Re:Got an old Raspberry Pi spare? Try RISC OS. It is, someth... by ptman on Friday May 03, 2024 @03:31AM (#40245152)
You could do with some other concept than users. E.g. namespaces or capabilities.
Re:Got an old Raspberry Pi spare? Try RISC OS. It is, someth... by pjmlp on Friday May 03, 2024 @05:18AM (#40245702)
It is another way to call a "user", hence why I used the word indentity instead.
Re:Got an old Raspberry Pi spare? Try RISC OS. It is, someth... by josephg on Friday May 03, 2024 @05:35AM (#40245794)
No its not. There's all sorts of stuff you can do with capabilities that are really awkward to even think about with users. Like, when a database starts, you can hand it the capabilities it needs to access a specific directory, listen on a specific port and append (but not read) a specific log file.

User based security is usually done by the folder being owned by the database, or an ACL or something. But with capabilities, you don't need to make a database user or set any flags on the folder, or make sure the database's configuration matches the filesystem permissions. The capability is basically a pre baked file handle that can be used directly. And capabilities can do lots more stuff! They can be more fine grained - eg, "Whatsapp can only access these specific photos in my camera roll". And a program can pass a subset of its capabilities to a child process.

Re:Got an old Raspberry Pi spare? Try RISC OS. It is, someth... by pjmlp on Friday May 03, 2024 @08:06AM (#40246740)
Capabilites have ownership, ownership requires belonging to something, all the way up to booting the OS.
Re:Got an old Raspberry Pi spare? Try RISC OS. It is, someth... by josephg on Friday May 03, 2024 @08:56AM (#40247172)
Capabilities can just be variables. Variables all belong to something, all the way up to the OS. Would you say variables are a type of user permission? Obviously not. Variables are more versatile than that. So are capabilities.
Re:Got an old Raspberry Pi spare? Try RISC OS. It is, someth... by Zambyte on Friday May 03, 2024 @08:52AM (#40247140)
This is what uid and gid are used for in Linux respectively. There is only a concept of "user" and "group" when you add a Unix-like operating system in top such as GNU or Alpine.