Introduction

RootAsRole comes from my PhD work on least administrative privilege.

The initial motivation was simple: in many production environments, administrators still receive broad and persistent root access, even when they only need a narrow set of actions.

That creates two problems at the same time:

• intentional abuse by insiders with too much privilege,
• unintentional compromise through supply-chain or tooling issues.

So the practical question became: how do we delegate admin work without delegating full root?

Project objectives

• Apply PoLAP in day-to-day operations.
• Delegate tasks, not unrestricted identities.
• Never give full root rights when not needed.
• Keep policy explicit and auditable.

Core components

• dosr: runs a command only if a role/task match is found.
• chsr: creates and maintains policy, roles, tasks, and execution options.
• capable: helps observe capability requirements during validation and tests.

Why another tool?

Linux already has strong primitives (permissions, ACLs, capabilities, MAC), but composing them coherently for co-administration is difficult. In practice, complexity often leads to over-permissioned shortcuts.

RootAsRole is the attempt to make that tractable: a policy-driven orchestrator that keeps delegation fine-grained and execution just-in-time.

Start with Installation, then follow First Policy in 10 Minutes.

For internals, see Architecture Overview.