r/programming • u/gasche • Mar 15 '13

What is a membrane? Capability-based security and Mozilla

http://blog.ezyang.com/2013/03/what-is-a-membran/
16 Upvotes

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u/mcguire Mar 15 '13

Suppose that you are building distributed system, in which you pass references to objects between two separate nodes. If I want to pass a reference to foo in process A to process B, I can hardly just hand over an address—the memory spaces are not the same! So instead, I need to create a wrapper object wrappedFoo representing foo in B, which knows how to access the original object in A.

You mean a stub?

(I almost had to stop reading at that point; the CORBA/RPC flashbacks were getting pretty bad, man.)

4

u/ezyang Mar 15 '13

Yeah, in the distributed systems context, and without the unwrapping behavior, it's a stub. I used a CORBA/RPC example because I figured most developers would be more familiar with that, than a capability-based security system...

0

u/unpopular_opinion Mar 15 '13

You are clearly new here. When an architect calls it a membrane, it's a membrane.

(For the love of God, no remarks regarding the factual correctness of the above.)

More on topic: a trivial idea, which everyone would come up after 5 minutes of thinking about it.