Not needing root to administer Linux - the home of libcap

This site is devoted to announcing new versions of libcap (both C and Go implementations), and sharing information about using Linux Capabilities -- an alternative to the superuser model of privilege under Linux.

Resources:

• Release notes for libcap, libpsx and Go packages cap and psx.

• You can read about Linux Capabilities in this OLS paper.

• Serge wrote a related article for Linux Journal.

• You can download libcap in the following ways:

  • As a tar file here (or with a signature here).

  • Or browse the git managed source here.

  • Courtesy of GitHub, we maintain a continuous build tester for the git repository here.

  • Repology has a page tracking how widely adopted each version of libcap is.

• We also provide a helper library for supporting POSIX semantics when libcap is used in threaded applications (linked against libpthread): libpsx.

  • This library can be used to support POSIX semantics for system calls not supported by the standard C libraries.

• Some Go walk-through examples for manipulating privilege under Linux.

• Feature requests and known issues are tracked here.

  • If you want to submit a patch, create a bug via the tracker, or you can directly email morgan@kernel.org an attachment formatted with git format-patch.

• The Linux capability implementation is based on a defunct draft POSIX.1e specification for various UN*X security extensions

  • See a copy of the last draft from the POSIX.1e committee.

• The SPDX-License-Identifier for libcap, libpsx, the cap and psx Go packages are all the same: "BSD-3-Clause OR GPL-2.0-only" . Note, pam_cap.so has its own license.