A new formal model for privilege control with supporting POSIX capability mechanism

In order to enforce the least privilege principle in the operating system, it is necessary for the process privilege to be effectively controlled; but this is very difficult because a process always changes as time changes. In this paper, based on the analysis on how the process privilege is generated and how it works, a hierarchy implementing the least privilege principle with three layers, i.e. administration layer, functionality control layer and performance layer, is posed. It is clearly demonstrated that to bound privilege’s working scope is a critical part for controlling privilege, but this is only mentioned implicitly while not supported in POSIX capability mechanism. Based on analysis of existing control mechanism for privilege, not only an improved capability inheritance formula but also a new complete formal model for controlling process based on integrating RBAC, DTE, and POSIX capability mechanism is introduced. The new invariants in the model show that this novel privilege control mechanism is different from RBAC’s, DTE’s, and POSIX’s, and it generalizes subdomain control mechanism and makes this mechanism dynamic.