Capabilities are a measure to limit the omnipotence of the superuser.
Currently a program started by root or setuid root has the power to do
anything. Capabilities (Linux-Privs) provide a more fine-grained access
control. Without kernel patches, you can use this library to drop
capabilities within setuid binaries. If you use patches, this can be
done automatically by the kernel.

This package provides the libcap2 system libraries.