title: Application-Defined Decentralized Access Control.
abstract: DCAC is a practical OS-level access control system that supports application-defined principals. It allows normal users to perform administrative operations within their privilege, enabling isolation and privilege separation for applications. It does not require centralized policy specification or management, giving applications freedom to manage their principals while the policies are still enforced by the OS. DCAC uses hierarchically-named attributes as a generic framework for user-defined policies such as groups defined by normal users. For both local and networked file systems, its execution time overhead is between0%-9%on file system microbenchmarks, and under1%on applications. This paper shows the design and implementation of DCAC, as well as several real-world use cases, including sandboxing applications, enforcing server applications' security policies, supporting NFS, and authenticating user-defined sub-principals in SSH, all with minimal code changes.
authors.forename: Yuanzhong
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Xu
authors.forename: Alan M
authors.initials: AM
authors.lastname: Dunn
authors.forename: Owen S
authors.initials: OS
authors.lastname: Hofmann
authors.forename: Michael Z
authors.initials: MZ
authors.lastname: Lee
authors.forename: Syed Akbar
authors.initials: SA
authors.lastname: Mehdi
authors.forename: Emmett
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Witchel