Re: [gentoo-hardened] Keeping gentoo-hardened alive (WAS: latest kernel exploit patch for vmsplice coming?)

On 13 Feb 2008 at 15:07, Geoff Kassel wrote:

> Speaking of PaX, another great, impossible thing would be to have a
> kernel-level feature for handling PaX violations in a less violent manner
> (core dumps are violent, in my mind)

coredumps are subject to the usual rlimit, so it's under userland control.

> - perhaps suspension of the process in question until investigated,

problem with this is DoS (exhaustion of RLIMIT_NPROC, not to mention all the
memory and other resources used by the process). probably not a problem for
a malicious local user as he'll just lock himself out but for a system service
(think apache or mysql) it is.

> with the possibility of resumption

this is not possible as the page fault that triggered PaX would just
occur again, ad infinitum. i.e., the userland process cannot make forward
progress (the non-executable or unmapped page where the fault occured will
stay so), the kernel must do something about it.

> (Perhaps I'm just unaware of an already existing feature.) Again, an
> upstream issue.

here's upstream ;-).

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