Re: inode->i_count security hole

Bill Hawes (whawes@star.net)
Mon, 12 Jan 1998 16:21:37 -0500

Alan Cox wrote:
>
> > Looking forward to 2.0.34 (with idt mem leak fix? This could be used as a
> > local DoS)
>
> Actually you can do better than a DoS attack with it. The fix is to make
> i_count a long at the moment.

If this is being caused by excessive hard links, wouldn't it be easier
to set some large but sane limit on the number of hard links allowed? A
limit of 1000 or so would probably allow all legitimate uses but safely
avoid any overflows. This would be easy to enforce in the link system
call.

Regards,
Bill