Somewhere on Shadow Earth, Stuart MacDonald wrote:
>I can fry my hard drive even if your patch is in the kernel. Therefore
>your patch secures nothing.
I thought (and maybe I am just stupid) that the intent of the patch was
not to stop deliberate damage, since that is not, practically speaking,
possible, but to prevent accidental damage. In other words, if I have a
process that got trashed and is sending random garbage to the driver,
this patch would catch it and stop me from accidentally trashing my disk.
Or, as they said when I was young, "Locks are for keeping honest people
honest." In other words, if you have root privileges and want to trash a
system, there are dozens of ways to do. This patch is merely intended to
protect those who aren't trying to trash the system from doing so
inadvertently.
So stop seeing this as a security patch, and see it as a safety patch; in
much the same way that we don't let regular users write to the raw device
files, we don't let them send unfiltered commands.
Just my 2.02 yen worth, YMMV, void where prohibited by law.
-- Timothy Knox tdk@thelbane.com "The church is near but the road is icy; the bar is far away but I will walk carefully." -- Russian proverb- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.rutgers.edu Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Mon Jul 31 2000 - 21:00:17 EST