A brief essay on capabilities

Abstract

In the course of the last three decades, capabilities have been successfully used to implement protection systems in multiples scenarios and platforms. Although the basic idea remains the same, a wide variety of techniques have been used in the implementation and administration of capabilities . As new paradigms emerged, the concept of capabilities has shown to scale very well with the change of models. As a matter of fact, several modern computational environments (particularly distributed ones) use some sort of capabilities as a protection mechanism. The goal of this paper is to review the main ideas related to capabilities as well as several of the approaches chosen in their implementation and use. This work is primarily intended as a support document for courses on operating systems and programming languages.