capability

Noun

capability (countable and uncountable, plural capabilities)

1. The power or ability to generate an outcome.
   • And that sight will become more common in the coming years, as the city’s police pursue an ambitious campaign to install thousands of cameras to elevate their surveillance capabilities.2024 October 5, Jessie Yeung, “Hong Kong plans to install thousands of surveillance cameras. Critics say it’s more proof the city is moving closer to China”, in CNN
2. A digital token allowing a user or process to interact in a specified way with an object that is subject to access control.
   • A file descriptor can be considered a capability that can only be leveraged using the appropriate system calls, passing it as an argument.
   • Enforcing a security policy means controlling the rights users can acquire to data. In a capability machine, a user’s rights are defined by the capabilities he (or a process acting on his behalf) can obtain and the access rights conferred by those capabilities.1987 November, Richard Y. Kain, Carl E. Landwehr, “On Access Checking in Capability-Based Systems”, in IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, volume SE-13, number 2, archived from the original on...