You could certainly write a Unix abstraction layer on top of seL4, or more commonly treat seL4 as a hypervisor, but you would not be able simply use a Unix interface to interact with seL4 and get all of it’s benefits.
Capability based systems don’t magically carry their desired properties up the abstraction ladder, they have to be maintained and the designer has to be vigilant to avoid introducing ambient authority by using capability based design themselves.
Genode is an example of a layer over seL4 that follows these principles.
If it's not too late to ask, where can we read about that? I've only ever seen ACL v. capability discussed in terms of trades-off as far as I remember.
Also, why it's inadequate?
"Unix 2.0" which is basically plan9/9front, uses namespaces, cpu, auth and so on 'servers' to authenticate users and even shared devices over the network.
FILE *fopen(const char *filename, const char *mode)
There's nothing in this function signature which specifies a capability to perform the open. Instead, there's an access control list somewhere else, where permission is looked up as to whether the file can be accessed by the current uid or whatever.Rule #1 of capabilities is: Don't separate designation from authority. Rather than a filename, a capability based API for opening files should take a capability argument instead of a filename, which both designates which file to open and provides the authority to open it, without attempting to look up that authority elsewhere. And notably, this capability cannot be forged - it can't be generated from a string containing the name of the file.
So the first step to making a POSIX on seL4 is to get rid of the POSIX API and replace it with a better API based on capabilities. Then of course, it is no longer POSIX.
The reason to use capabilities rather than ACLs is that ACLs are vulnerable to confused deputy attacks. Linux namespaces have numerous security vulnerabilities that could be avoided with capabilities. Also note that POSIX "capabilities" are not proper capabilities in the sense they're used in capability based security (as in seL4).