Messages in this thread | | | Date | Tue, 18 Jan 2000 10:12:29 +0100 | From | Helge Hafting <> | Subject | RE: Why wrapping PIDs is evil [was 32bit] |
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> The point here is not that it's possible to do unsafe things but that it's > impossible to do safe things. A person or program that wants to kill a > particular process has, in principle, no way to do it without fear of > killing innocent processes. > Seems to me the risk of someone accidentally guessing the root password is greater than this.
Someone spawning enough processes to wrap the PIDs probably show up in more ways than simply having a process you want to kill. The paranoid administrator can run ps twice and notice the fluctuating PID, (or possibly a user with 32000 processes)
Noticing a "clever" hacker, there are other ways than kill. Remove him from /etc/passwd, move the home directory, zero his disk quota. Temporarily firewall his IP address or change baud rate on his serial line. Any of this may crash his exploit. If not - use up all the remaining PID's, then kill the now very predictable one. The brave administrator might trash his memory through /dev/mem or something. Picking a fight with root is usually not a good idea.
Helge Hafting
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