#objectcapabilities — Public Fediverse posts

Capsudo: Rethinking Sudo with Object Capabilities

https://ariadne.space/2025/12/12/rethinking-sudo-with-object-capabilities.html

#HackerNews #Capsudo #RethinkingSudo #ObjectCapabilities #Security #Innovation #TechNews

The federated social web is living in its second golden age, after the original success of StatusNet and OStatus in the late 2000s.

A lot of this success has been around unification of adoption of a single protocol, #ActivityPub, to connect together the many different instances and applications into a unified network.

Unfortunately from a security and social threat perspective, the way ActivityPub is currently rolled out is under-prepared to protect its users.

In this paper we introduce #OcapPub, which is compatible with the original ActivityPub specification.
With only mild to mildly-moderate adjustments to the existing network, we can deliver what we call “networks of consent”:
explicit and intentional connections between different users and entities on the network.

The idea of “networks of consent” is then implemented on top of a security paradigm called “object capabilities”, which as we will see can be neatly mapped on top of the actor model, on which ActivityPub is based.

While we do not claim that all considerations of consent can be modeled in this or any protocol, we believe that the maximum of consent that is possible to encode in such a system can be encoded.

Paradoxically, what may initially appear to be a restriction actually opens up the possibility of richer interactions than were previously possible on the federated social web while better preserving the intentions of users on the network.
#NetworksOfConsent #ObjectCapabilities #security
https://gitlab.com/spritely/ocappub

@aral @cancel there's some recognition and of a possible solution to this problem using #objectCapabilities #ocaps #ocappub
https://gitlab.com/spritely/ocappub/blob/master/README.org

I'm starting to read ideas about using #ObjectCapabilities to manage #harassment on the fediverse. I'm pessimistic so far, although I could be surprised.
Specifically, I think OCaps will be effective at stopping people from punching down, but will also prevent spontaneous connections and stop people from punching up. That would be fine for a Facebook replacement, but not a Twitter replacement.
I'm aware not everyone wants a Twitter replacement, but I'll still be on the network that is one.

@icedquinn there's a much larger conversation to be had here about how computer security needs to work. In a nutshell, we are just emerging from the Wild West era of computing and we are figuring out how to replace isolated and often drunk-in-charge town Marshals and Sheriffs (package maintainers), with a robust, integrated public security infrastructure (#ObjectCapabilities, #ReproducibleBuilds etc). @librelounge did a whole episode on this:
https://librelounge.org/episodes/episode-2-thanksgiving-npm-and-malware-in-free-software.html

@succfemboi #ObjectCapabilities are a cool concept. Not sure how they relate to this discussion though. Can you expand on that?

@bamfic don't know, but there's a great discussion on #ObjectCapabilities on the @librelounge podcast :)
https://librelounge.org/episodes/episode-13-object-capabilities-with-kate-sills.html
@cwebber