Re: [2.4.18] Security: Process-Killer if machine get's out of memory

[Andreas Hartmann <andihartmann@freenet.de>]

Christian Bornträger wrote:
> Rik van Riel wrote:
> 
>>On Sun, 24 Mar 2002, Roy Sigurd Karlsbakk wrote:
>>
>>>Would it hard to do some memory allocation statistics, so if some
>>>process at one point (as rsync did) goes crazy eating all memory, that
>>>would be detected?
>>
>>No.  What I doubt however is whether it would be worth it,
>>since most machines never run OOM.
> 
> 
> Well, I think could be worth in terms of security, because a local user could 
> use a bad memory-eating program to produce an Denial of Service of other 
> processes.

That's what I fear.

Take the actual example. You've running a server on which people can 
connect with rsync. Somebody breaks off rsync - and the rsync-process on 
the server is getting crazy - that's the situation, I described at the 
beginning.

Now, the httpd-process on the server is killed, the named, ... .

It's a perfect DOS-attack.


Regards,
Andreas Hartmann