Selected Readings

Publications by topic

• Hardware / CAP

  • The Cambridge CAP Computer and Its Operating System (PDF) (Cached: PDF)
    by Maurice Vincent Wilkes, Roger Michael Needham, and Peter J. Denning.
    Elsevier North Holland 1979,Operating and Programming Systems Series. (BibTeX entry)·

• Hardware / CHERI

  • Capability Hardware Enhanced RISC Instructions: CHERI Instruction-Set Architecture (Version 7) (PDF) (Cached: PDF)
    by Robert N. M. Watson, Peter G. Neumann, Jonathan Woodruff, Michael Roe, Hesham Almatary, Jonathan Anderson, John Baldwin, David Chisnall, Brooks Davis, Nathaniel Wesley Filardo, Alexandre Joannou, Ben Laurie, Simon W. Moore, Steven J. Murdoch, Kyndylan Nienhuis, Robert Norton, Alex Richardson, Peter Rugg, Peter Sewell, Stacey Son, and Hongyan Xia.
    University of Cambridge, Computer Laboratory technical report UCAM-CL-TR-927, October 2018. (BibTeX entry)·

• Operating Systems

  • The Cambridge CAP Computer and Its Operating System (PDF) (Cached: PDF)
    by Maurice Vincent Wilkes, Roger Michael Needham, and Peter J. Denning.
    Elsevier North Holland 1979,Operating and Programming Systems Series. (BibTeX entry)·

• Operating Systems / HYDRA

  • HYDRA/C.mmp An Experimental Computer System
    by William A. Wulf, Roy Levin, and Samuel P. Harbinson.
    McGraw-Hill 1981. (BibTeX entry)·

• Operating Systems / PSOS

  • The Foundations of a Provably Secure Operating System (PSOS) (PDF) (Cached: PDF)
    by R. J. Feiertag and P. G. Neumann.
    In the Proceedings of the National Computer Conference, 1979, pages 329-334. (BibTeX entry)·

• Surveys

  • Capability-Based Computer Systems (website)
    by Henry M. Levy.
    Digital Press 1984. (BibTeX entry)·

    Levy reviews systems up through the mid-1980s, including the Cambridge CAP, HYDRA, StarOS, IBM's System/38, and Intel's iAPX 432. The book is out of print but the website hosts PDF copies of each chapter.

• Theory

  • Protection in Programmed Systems
    by Anita Katherine Jones.
    PhD, Carnegie Mellon University, June 1973. (BibTeX entry)·

  • Naming and Protection in Extendible Operating Systems
    by David D Redell.
    Ph.D. thesis, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1974. (BibTeX entry)·

  • The Confused Deputy (or why capabilities might have been invented)
    by Norman Hardy.
    In ACM SIGOPS Operating Systems Review 22(4), October 1988. (BibTeX entry)·

  • Capability Myths Demolished (PDF) (Cached: PDF)
    by Mark S Miller, Ka-Ping Yee, and Jonathan Shapiro.
    Johns Hopkins University technical report , 2003. (BibTeX entry)·

  • Paradigm Regained: Abstraction Mechanisms for Access Control (website, PDF) (Cached: PDF)
    by Mark S. Miller and Jonathan S. Shapiro.
    In the Proceedings of Advances in Computing Science – ASIAN 2003, Berlin, Heidelberg, 2003, pages 224-242. (BibTeX entry)·