Re: 3Dfx security issues

Daryll Strauss (daryll@harlot.rb.ca.us)
Fri, 12 Mar 1999 10:12:27 -0800


On Fri, Mar 12, 1999 at 06:47:51PM +0000, Alan Cox wrote:
> It tends to come down to "was the board designed by someone who felt it
> shouldn't trash your PC". SGI get away with this because their MMIO stuff
> isnt capable of trashing the machine. I'm hoping Matrox got this right
> as XFree86 + the PI direct render work + Mesa is going to be really nice
> if they did.

I think you haven't worked on an SGIs enough. We've seen many
applications crash the machine. We've got one at DD currently. A gamma
application, when you set the gamma to 0, your Onyx will crash. I
suspect SGI gets away with it, because no one has tried writing random
data to their boards. :-)

> As regards the 3DFx doodoo driver, I would personally say the situation
> the driver creates is potentially worse but not if set up carefully. It goes
> from "root can install something stupid" to "any user can trash the box" in
> the naive setup. But with your driver and group only access it becomes
> setgid voodoo and thats yes - definitely a win

Yes, if the person installing the device didn't read the README, they
could be worse off. I would hope that root installing a new device would
be at least as careful as installing a program setuid. The README warned
the user that you could crash the box with the device and to restrict
access appropriately. That's why I would never want it in the standard
kernel, as it would be too easy to just throw it in without
understanding the issues.

- |Daryll

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