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by noobermin 3098 days ago
Aside from the microkernel, doesn't Android already do capability based security?
2 comments

No. It has a user-visible idea of "capabilities" in the sense that apps get a checklist of things they can and cannot access, but that's not "capability based security," just another access control list.

Capability based security like Fuchsia has means that there is no ambient authority, or in other words no singleton resources. No fopen(), no connect(), etc. Instead, processes access everything through file-handle-like objects that are given to them by their creator, which can thus be sandboxed/mocked/revoked/etc without anything extra like containers or jails or VMs.

I think this is a much lower level thing.