In two chapter, you 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 important aspect: security.
We have divided the coverage of this key area into two major parts, each of which is a chapter in this book:
- In Chapter 7, Process Credentials, the traditional-style Unix permissions model is discussed in some detail, and techniques to run programs with root privileges but without requiring the root password were shown.
- In this 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 to learn about the traditional mechanisms and how they operate...
