Re: [PATCH] kernel: make /proc/kallsyms mode 400 to reduce ease ofattacking

From: david
Date: Fri Nov 19 2010 - 14:59:38 EST


On Fri, 19 Nov 2010, Linus Torvalds wrote:

On Fri, Nov 19, 2010 at 11:19 AM, Sarah Sharp
<sarah.a.sharp@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

.config and dmesg are attached.  The box is running klogd 1.5.5ubuntu3
(from Jaunty).  Yes, I know that's old.  I read the bit in the commit
about changing the permissions of kallsyms after boot, but if I can't
boot that doesn't help.  Perhaps this can be made a configuration
option?

It's not worth a config option.

If it actually breaks user-space, I think we should just revert it.

how far back do we need to maintain compatibility with userspace?

Is this something that we can revisit in a few years and lock it down then?

David Lang

It's kind of sad to default to the world-visible thing, but as I
mentioned in the commit, this is something where a sysadmin or distro
can trivially just fix it at boot-time too, with just a

chmod og-r /proc/kallsyms

in your bootup scripts.

And if somebody has taken control of the machine _before_ the bootup
scripts get to run, you have bigger problems than a /proc/kallsyms
file.

So I guess I'll revert it.

Thanks for testing and bisecting.

Linus
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