Messages in this thread | | | Date | Mon, 20 Aug 2007 10:42:47 -0400 | From | Chris Snook <> | Subject | Re: Fork Bombing Patch |
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Anand Jahagirdar wrote: > Hi > As Per the Previous Discussion of my Patch,I think insted of using > KERN_CRIT,it is better to lower the priority level to KERN_WARNING. > thats why i used KERN_WARNING.it will warn administrator and its > administrator responsibility to take whatever action he want to take. > > anand
Philosophically, I'm okay with the idea of a forkbomb meriting KERN_WARN priority, but we should never have a printk that can be trivially triggered by an unprivileged user that gets anything higher than KERN_INFO. If I'm an attacker, and I want to do bad things without getting logged, the first thing I do is launch a carefully-tuned forkbomb that doesn't bog down the system, just triggers this message as often as the ratelimit will allow. Once /var/log is full, I can do my nastiness. Administrators need to be able to protect against that kind of thing without losing the ability to log KERN_WARN and higher priority messages.
Also, I stand by my assertion that we should only be complaining if the hard limit is also exceeded, since it's totally valid for an application to self-constrain using soft limits. It may be uncommon, but the people who happen to use whatever applications do this will be very unhappy when they update their kernel and /var fills up from this spew.
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