On Fri, 21 Jul 2000, Myrddin Emrys wrote:
> It's cement for one hole that you know exists... what about a dozen others
> you don't? There's probably two dozen documented other places where you can
> fry some subsystem or another. Protecting the system against a malicious
> root is an exercise in futility. No matter what you do, how you guard the
> system, root can bypass it. This is by design, as you well know. That is how
> Linux (and most *nix) works.
Let me try to understand what you're saying...
It is established that a system's interface allows programs to
physically destroy a disk drive, without providing any benefit
whatsoever. However, since it's possible to fry other hardware,
too, why bother with this problem???
The fact of the matter is, that it is wrong for a program to
destroy hardware. It is the kernel's job to ensure that it
can't. It is pure laziness to ignore the issue.
My feeling is that we should try to avoid all possible ways of
accidentally or maliciously breaking parts. We can start out
by fixing the IDE subsystem, and then go on to others. Just
because other stuff is broken, too, doesn't mean that we should
give up.
----------------------------------------------
Andrew McNabb
Argus Systems Group
amcnabb@argus-systems.com
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This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Sun Jul 23 2000 - 21:00:16 EST