Messages in this thread | | | Date | Sun, 20 Sep 1998 16:09:00 -0700 (PDT) | From | Linus Torvalds <> | Subject | Re: [PATCH] (please check) Potential security fix for i386/kernel/ptrace.c |
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On Sun, 20 Sep 1998, Jamie Lokier wrote: > > The problem is that a user may be able to a hardware breakpoint in the > kernel address range; who knows what affect that may have. This may > crash the kernel or simply leak information; either thing is not good.
It should actually be safe. The debug trap handler is careful to not aquire any locks (ie no deadlock situations), and should alwasy ignore events from kernel space.
The patch looks fine regardless, but I want to have a robust system, and that does mean that even if somebody can trigger a debug trap in the kernel (easy to do by just having a read() system call write over something you want to get the trap on in user mode) then the kernel should not really have to care anyway.
So it might actually be valid to rmeove the test altogether. I'll think about it.
Linus
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