On Fri, 22 Jun 2012 14:09:28 -0700 Kees Cook <keescook@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > On Fri, Jun 22, 2012 at 12:55 PM, Andrew Morton > <akpm@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > On Fri, 22 Jun 2012 12:24:13 -0700 > > Kees Cook <keescook@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > > >> The value > >> of suid_dumpable=2 is now historic, and attempting to set this sysctl > >> value returns -EINVAL. > > > > This sounds a bit harsh - will it not cause existing configurations to > > immediately break? __If so, would it not be better to retain the =2 mode > > for a while, and emit a nice warning when it is set? > > I view it as a security vulnerability, so I'd rather see it > eliminated. I see "=1" as a security vulnerability too, but at least > that's well-known to be a bad idea. The "=2" mode has been assumed to > be safe, but it isn't. But what will be the effects of the change? People's initscripts do an "echo 2" which fails and the error message (if any) won't get logged anywhere where anyone looks. So now their machine is bumbling along in the wrong mode and much later on, someone notices that coredumps are going awry? This is not exactly a user-friendly way of rolling out kernel API changes! And how serious is the security vulnerability, in real-world terms? Serious enough to risk this amount of bustage? -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-doc" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html