lkml.org 
[lkml]   [2007]   [Dec]   [2]   [last100]   RSS Feed
Views: [wrap][no wrap]   [headers]  [forward] 
 
Messages in this thread
/
Date
From
SubjectRe: Relax permissions for reading hard drive serial number?
On Thu, Nov 29, 2007 at 10:07:46PM +0100, Bartlomiej Zolnierkiewicz wrote:
> > There are people who, for privacy reasons, really don't like that "unique"
> > unchangeable serial numbers can be retrieved by untrusted users.
> >
> > You should probably chmod the file on the users system, if he is fine with
> > that, but not change the kernel default.
>
> Seconded.
>
> While on it, how's about exporting model/firmware/serial through
> sysfs so /proc/ide/hd*/identify don't have to be used?


Nice, except that while my home workstation running 2.6.23 kernel
does have 4 SATA disks in it, plus a compact flash memory card on
PATA (boot device, while SATA-disks are JBOD in SW RAID), it has
_no_ /sys/bus/ide/, nor /proc/ide/
All devices are under /sys/bus/scsi/

Simplest way for me to pick this data is to use "hdparm -I /dev/sdX"
command. Which of course must be run as root. All it does is to open
named device, and issue one ioctl().

That ioctl() can be embedded into a suid-root helper program, or it
can even (in case of Wine) be run separately to write a text file
storing these identifier data on some Wine config file, which the
"read from physical device X" then does receive.

In my case I don't want to report any of the hard-drive serial numbers,
but rather my boot-device - a flash drive. Hard-drives do break at
some point in time, a flash drive in read-only mode does last considerably
longer.

> [PATCH] ide: add /sys/bus/ide/devices/*/{model,firmware,serial} sysfs entries
...

/Matti Aarnio


\
 
 \ /
  Last update: 2007-12-02 17:47    [W:0.311 / U:0.324 seconds]
©2003-2020 Jasper Spaans|hosted at Digital Ocean and TransIP|Read the blog|Advertise on this site