In this chapter, and the following one, the reader will learn concepts and practices regarding process credentials and capabilities. Besides being of practical importance to application development in Linux, this chapter, by its very nature, delves deeper into an often overlooked but extremely key aspect: security. The content of this and the following chapter is very much inter-related.
We divide the coverage of this key area into two major parts, each of which is a chapter in this book:
- In this chapter, the traditional-style Unix permissions model is discussed in some detail, and techniques to run programs with root privileges without requiring the root password are shown.
- In Chapter 8, Process Capabilities, the modern approach, the POSIX capabilities model, is discussed in some detail.
We will attempt to clearly show the reader that, while it is important...
