On Thu, Apr 25, 2024 at 02:38:42PM -0700, Andrew Morton wrote: > On Thu, 25 Apr 2024 14:21:39 -0700 Suren Baghdasaryan <surenb@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > > > > > The side effect of locking down more and more reporting interfaces is > > > > > that programs that consume those interfaces now have to run as root. > > > > > > > > sudo cat /proc/allocinfo | analyse-that-fie > > > > > > Even that is still an annoyance, but I'm thinking more about a future > > > daemon to collect this every n seconds - that really shouldn't need to > > > be root. > > > > Yeah, that would preclude some nice usecases. Could we maybe use > > CAP_SYS_ADMIN checks instead? That way we can still use it from a > > non-root process? > > I'm inclined to keep Kees's 0400. Yes it's a hassle but security is > always a hassle. Let's not make Linux less secure, especially for > people who aren't even using /proc/allocinfo. That's a bit too trite; we've seen often enough that putting security above all other concerns leads to worse outcomes in the long run; impair usability too much and you're just causing more problems than you solve. We need to take a balanced approach, like with everything else we do. I'd really like to hear from Kees why pre-sorting the output so we aren't leaking kernel image details wouldn't be sufficient.
