The Fuzz

Over Christmas break I took a test my mom wanted me to — one based on finding out what types of things you’re good at, not your personality. I came out the strongest in “Ideation” which is defined by the book as the creation of new ideas. Looking back on my life I can see this coming out a lot. And I do mean a lot. I’m great at coming up with new ideas, but once I’ve sufficiently explored one to my satisfaction I put it aside. So you are probably going to see a lot of new projects here with little or no closure. Eventually the source code to all of them will be released under the GPL or some other open-source license. It’s my hope that if one of my ideas generates enough interest that it will be taken on by someone else to be developed into a mature project.

Just a few thoughts. On to the main entry, which is another — surprise — idea!

The Fuzz in actionI wrote a while ago about an idea to jail a Linux process, and a few nights ago I finally realized how I would implement it: D-Bus. A security manager installs itself in a well-known location on the session bus, and programs that know about it use it to request authorization before performing actions. I’m calling the D-Bus specification “Fuzz” for now.

The screenshot to the right is a proof-of-concept implementation of Fuzz, using C# for the manager and a C library preloaded into Iceweasel as a client. This is a live screenshot, not a mock-up — the system works, right now!

So I guess we’ll see how long before I tire of this project. Hopefully not before I have an implementation that works for most needs.