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SubjectRe: [PATCH v2] kernel: escape non-ASCII and control characters in printk()

* Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org> wrote:

> On Mon, Jun 27, 2011 at 11:38 AM, Vasiliy Kulikov <segoon@openwall.com> wrote:
> >
> > Sure, I don't propose it anymore (v2 goes without it).
>
> What point would you like to filter things at?
>
> I really think that user space should do its own filtering - nobody
> does a plain 'cat' on dmesg. Or if they do, they really have
> themselves to blame.
>
> And afaik, we don't do any escape sequence handling at the console
> level either, so you cannot mess up the console with control
> characters.
>
> And the most dangerous character seems to be one that you don't
> filter: the one we really do react to is '\n', and you could possibly
> make confusing log messages by embedding a newline in your string and
> then trying to make the rest look like something bad (say, an oops).
>
> So I'm not entirely convinced about this filtering at all.

Yeah. It would be nice to see a demonstration of at least one 'bad
thing' that is possible via the current code, before we protect
against it.

The claim the patch makes is rather specific:

| There are numerous printk() instances with user supplied input as
| "%s" data, and unprivileged user may craft log messages with
| substrings containing control characters via these printk()s.
| Control characters might fool root viewing the logs via tty, e.g.
| using ^[1A to suppress the previous log line.

So it ought to be demonstrable.

Thanks,

Ingo


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