libcap-ng does not handle the addition of new capabilities gracefully. So far, I've found the following issues: 1. CAP_LAST_CAP is exposed in cap-ng.h. cap-ng.h should instead expose a function or an extern const int that is set at runtime. This makes looping over all capabilities work poorly. (/proc/sys/kernel/cap_last_cap is there for exactly this reason.) 2. capng_capability_to_name returns null (often causing segfaults) when the input parameter isn't in the lookup table. It could return something more clever like "cap_%d" with %d filled in appropriately. (Leaking a few bytes per unknown capability number wouldn't be so bad -- it's a bounded leak.) 3. capng_name_to_capability can't parse names that aren't in the lookup table. (2 and 3 would be greatly improved if there was a way to ask the kernel for the names of capabilities.) 4. CAP_LAST_CAP is a compile-time constant in cap-ng.c, meaning that many things are likely to break if new capabilities are added. A stopgap measure would be to just fix #1 so that a mismatch between header and library version won't cause problems.
Hmm...I didn't know about that proc entry. I'll see what I can do. I can likely do something with #2, but not #3. Thanks for pointing out the proc entry. The audit system and strace would have the same issues on interpreting unknown capabilities.
Allowing capng_name_to_capability to parse cap_<number> is probably the best that can be done about #3.
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Still planning to make some changes...moving to rawhide.
This now fixed in SVN and will be in libcap-ng-0.7.4.
A new package was released fixing this.