Re: [RFC] Android Logger vs. Shared Memory FIGHT!

[Tim Bird <tim.bird@am.sony.com>]

On 3/29/2012 10:52 AM, Daniel Walker wrote:
> On Thu, Mar 29, 2012 at 09:25:26AM -0700, Tim Bird wrote:
>> At the moment, I'm not considering an alternative for logger that runs
>> completely in user-space.  Having said that, this test is certainly interesting,
>> and may provide some performance numbers for logger or alternatives that would
>> be useful to compare.
>
> I was just thinking what does an accurate PID actually get you? If you
> looking at some logs with a PID of 20048, does that mean something to
> you? It doesn't actually mean much because you can't map that back to
> anything. If you have the device, and the process is still running then
> you could look it up ..
>
> So lets say logger was modified to record comm values.. That way you
> could record the actual process name AND the pid. Well if you use
> prctl(PR_SET_NAME), you can forge comm values. So that doesn't get you
> much either..
>
> So even if you record accurate PID values, it doesn't mean anything
> anyway.
Putting bogus pids in the log would allow a log DDOS-er to hide their
activity more easily.  But with the log in user-space, there are much more
insidious things that could be done to hide or corrupt log activity.  So
the sensitivity of this particular piece of log data is not that great.
  -- Tim