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Tony Garnock-Jones@tonyg@pubsub.leastfixedpoint.com (2026-09-17 17:43:44)
These are the links I am sharing with my students who are interested in learning about the Object-Capability (ocap) model. What other good general introductions to the concepts are out there?
C. Morningstar, “What Are Capabilities?,” Habitat Chronicles, May 2017. https://web.archive.org/web/20190423070131/http://habitatchronicles.com/2017/05/what-are-capabilities/
N. Hardy, “The Confused Deputy: (or why capabilities might have been invented),” SIGOPS Oper. Syst. Rev., vol. 22, no. 4, pp. 36–38, 1988, doi: 10.1145/54289.871709. http://cap-lore.com/CapTheory/ConfusedDeputy.html
M. S. Miller, K.-P. Yee, and J. S. Shapiro, “Capability Myths Demolished,” Systems Research Laboratory, Department of Computer Science, Johns Hopkins University, Technical Report SRL2003-02, Mar. 2003. https://papers.agoric.com/assets/pdf/papers/capability-myths-demolished.pdf
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Ridley@ridley@hachyderm.io (2026-09-17 21:04:06)
@tonyg Those three are excellent choices!
The other one that comes to mind is Tyler Close’s “ACLs don’t”:
https://papers.agoric.com/assets/pdf/papers/acls-dont.pdf
Jonathan Frederickson@jfred@jawns.club (2026-09-17 21:08:42)
@tonyg "A Security Kernel Based on the Lambda-Calculus" by Jonathan Rees is one of my favorites: https://mumble.net/~jar/pubs/secureos/
Reading through this in detail years back really helped me cement my understanding of ocaps
Christine Lemmer-Webber@cwebber@social.coop (2026-09-17 21:23:40)
@tonyg It's not completely general since it has a very opinionated introduction, but I know many people have found Heart of Spritely to be their introduction to capability security, and it is intended as such https://files.spritely.institute/papers/spritely-core.html