Re: thoughts on kernel security issues

[William Lee Irwin III]

On Wed, Jan 12, 2005 at 06:28:38PM -0800, Andrew Morton wrote:
>> IMO, local DoS holes are important mainly because buggy userspace
>> applications allow remote users to get in and exploit them, and for that
>> reason we of course need to fix them up.  Even though such an attacker
>> could cripple the machine without exploiting such a hole.
>> For the above reasons I see no need to delay publication of local DoS holes
>> at all.  The only thing for which we need to provide special processing is
>> privilege escalation bugs.
>> Or am I missing something?

On Wed, Jan 12, 2005 at 10:35:42PM -0500, Dave Jones wrote:
> The problem is it depends on who you are, and what you're doing with Linux
> how much these things affect you.
> A local DoS doesn't both me one squat personally, as I'm the only
> user of computers I use each day. An admin of a shell server or
> the like however would likely see this in a different light.
> (though it can be argued a mallet to the kneecaps of the user
>  responsible is more effective than any software update)

It deeply disturbs me to hear this kind of talk. If we're pretending to
be a single-user operating system, why on earth did we use UNIX as a
precedent in the first place?


On Wed, Jan 12, 2005 at 10:35:42PM -0500, Dave Jones wrote:
> An information leak from kernel space may be equally as mundane to some,
> though terrifying to some admins. Would you want some process to be
> leaking your root password, credit card #, etc to some other users process ?
> priveledge escalation is clearly the number one threat. Whilst some
> class 'remote root hole' higher risk than 'local root hole', far
> too often, we've had instances where execution of shellcode by
> overflowing some buffer in $crappyapp has led to a shell
> turning a local root into a remote root.
> For us thankfully, exec-shield has trapped quite a few remotely
> exploitable holes, preventing the above.

If we give up and say we're never going to make multiuser use secure,
where is our distinction from other inherently insecure single-user OS's?


-- wli
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