On Fri, 21 Jul 2000, Aaron Sethman wrote:
> On Sat, 22 Jul 2000, David Luyer wrote:
> > So what?
> >
> > It is _much_ easier to do "cat </dev/zero >/dev/sda"
> > and about as likely to be effective.
> >
> > David.
> But how often is a program with a bug in it likely to execute this
> command? Lets say some program has a buffer overflow somewhere and it
> ends up clobbering the section of memory that holds the bits for the
> ioctl. Suddenly your data is gone and your left clueless. My question is
> what functionality are you going to lose by have some sanity checking in
> the kernel? Yes I know you can fiddle with /dev/mem etc..but this is know
> where near as likely to be triggered by a buggy program now is it?
And yet you would need to be root to do this, and I would suspect
it *much* more likely a clueless root user would cat junk to /dev/sda than
a program run as root which uses ioctl's would clobber it's own memory
space and nuke the disk. Probably alot more likely any such program would
segfault before doing much actually.
Stephen
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