Oracle Solaris Security for Developers Guide

Inheritable Privilege Set

At login or from a new profile shell, the inheritable set contains the privileges that have been specified by the administrator. These inheritable privileges can potentially be passed on to child processes after an exec(1) call. A process should remove any unnecessary privileges to prevent these privileges from passing on to a child process. Often the permitted and inheritable sets are the same. However, there can be cases where a privilege is taken out of the inheritable set, but that privilege remains in the permitted set.