"This document is intended to specify the security goal that AppArmor is intended to achieve, so that users can evaluate whether AppArmor will meet their needs, and kernel developers can evaluate whether AppArmor is living up to its claims. This document is *not* a general purpose explanation of how AppArmor works, nor is it an explanation for why one might want to use AppArmor rather than some other system," began Crispin Cowan, following Arjan van de Ven's earlier suggestion to document security module intent. Crispin continued:

"AppArmor is intended to protect systems from attackers exploiting vulnerabilities in applications that the system hosts. The threat is that an attacker can cause a vulnerable application to do something unexpected and undesirable. AppArmor addresses this threat by confining the application to access only the resources it needs to access to execute properly, effectively imposing 'least privilege' execution on the application.

"Applications have access to a number of resources including files, interprocess communication, networking, capabilities, and execution of other applications. The purpose of least privilege is to bound the damage that a malicious user or code can do by removing access to all resources that the application does not need for its intended function. For instance, a policy for a web server might grant read only access to most web documents, preventing an attacker who can corrupt the web server from defacing the web pages."