[COFF] The MOO problem and set-uid

[Bakul Shah]

On Jan 30, 2020, at 12:25 PM, Dave Horsfall <dave at horsfall.org> wrote:
> 
> Thanks, all, for the responses; it was driving me nuts!  I know the game as "cows and bulls" (or perhaps that's because I'm of British origin).
> 
> I like Dennis' observation: "On the other hand, suid these days seems to be a fairly blunt and dangerous instrument".  I've often believed that if you thought you needed set-uid (esp. to root!) you can probably get away with set-gid instead.

Capabilities[1] (Dennis, Van Horn, 1966) would have solved the MOO problem.
And the CAP computer project had already started in Cambridge!

[1] 
https://www.princeton.edu/~rblee/ELE572Papers/Fall04Readings/ProgramSemantics_DennisvanHorn.pdf

Re-reading this papers decades later it is interesting to see that
the modern object caps are basically not very different from the
original concept! Also interesting to see fork() here.