LiCA: A Fine-grained and Path-sensitive Linux Capability Analysis Framework

The capability mechanism in Linux-based systems is designed for dispersing the root privileges into a set of more refined capabilities, making programs gain no-more-necessary privileges. However, it is challenging to check the necessity and sufficiency of capabilities assigned to programs due to the highly complicated call chains invoked in practice. Inappropriate capability assignment brings threats to the systems. For example, over-privileged programs could allow an attacker to misuse root privileges, while under-privileged programs may incur runtime errors.