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When writing to a sysctl string, each write, regardless of VFS position,
begins writing the string from the start. This means the contents of
the last write to the sysctl controls the string contents instead of the
first:
open("/proc/sys/kernel/modprobe", O_WRONLY) = 1
write(1, "AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA"..., 4096) = 4096
write(1, "/bin/true", 9) = 9
close(1) = 0
$ cat /proc/sys/kernel/modprobe
/bin/true
Expected behaviour would be to have the sysctl be "AAAA..." capped at
maxlen (in this case KMOD_PATH_LEN: 256), instead of truncating to the
contents of the second write. Similarly, multiple short writes would
not append to the sysctl.
The old behavior is unlike regular POSIX files enough that doing audits
of software that interact with sysctls can end up in unexpected or
dangerous situations. For example, "as long as the input starts with a
trusted path" turns out to be an insufficient filter, as what must also
happen is for the input to be entirely contained in a single write
syscall -- not a common consideration, especially for high level tools.
This provides kernel.sysctl_writes_strict as a way to make this behavior
act in a less surprising manner for strings, and disallows non-zero file
position when writing numeric sysctls (similar to what is already done
when reading from non-zero file positions). For now, the default (0) is
to warn about non-zero file position use, but retain the legacy
behavior. Setting this to -1 disables the warning, and setting this to
1 enables the file position respecting behavior.
[akpm@linux-foundation.org: fix build]
[akpm@linux-foundation.org: move misplaced hunk, per Randy]
Signed-off-by: Kees Cook <keescook@chromium.org>
Cc: Randy Dunlap <rdunlap@infradead.org>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
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| .. | ||
| 00-INDEX | ||
| abi.txt | ||
| fs.txt | ||
| kernel.txt | ||
| net.txt | ||
| README | ||
| sunrpc.txt | ||
| vm.txt | ||
Documentation for /proc/sys/ kernel version 2.2.10 (c) 1998, 1999, Rik van Riel <riel@nl.linux.org> 'Why', I hear you ask, 'would anyone even _want_ documentation for them sysctl files? If anybody really needs it, it's all in the source...' Well, this documentation is written because some people either don't know they need to tweak something, or because they don't have the time or knowledge to read the source code. Furthermore, the programmers who built sysctl have built it to be actually used, not just for the fun of programming it :-) ============================================================== Legal blurb: As usual, there are two main things to consider: 1. you get what you pay for 2. it's free The consequences are that I won't guarantee the correctness of this document, and if you come to me complaining about how you screwed up your system because of wrong documentation, I won't feel sorry for you. I might even laugh at you... But of course, if you _do_ manage to screw up your system using only the sysctl options used in this file, I'd like to hear of it. Not only to have a great laugh, but also to make sure that you're the last RTFMing person to screw up. In short, e-mail your suggestions, corrections and / or horror stories to: <riel@nl.linux.org> Rik van Riel. ============================================================== Introduction: Sysctl is a means of configuring certain aspects of the kernel at run-time, and the /proc/sys/ directory is there so that you don't even need special tools to do it! In fact, there are only four things needed to use these config facilities: - a running Linux system - root access - common sense (this is especially hard to come by these days) - knowledge of what all those values mean As a quick 'ls /proc/sys' will show, the directory consists of several (arch-dependent?) subdirs. Each subdir is mainly about one part of the kernel, so you can do configuration on a piece by piece basis, or just some 'thematic frobbing'. The subdirs are about: abi/ execution domains & personalities debug/ <empty> dev/ device specific information (eg dev/cdrom/info) fs/ specific filesystems filehandle, inode, dentry and quota tuning binfmt_misc <Documentation/binfmt_misc.txt> kernel/ global kernel info / tuning miscellaneous stuff net/ networking stuff, for documentation look in: <Documentation/networking/> proc/ <empty> sunrpc/ SUN Remote Procedure Call (NFS) vm/ memory management tuning buffer and cache management These are the subdirs I have on my system. There might be more or other subdirs in another setup. If you see another dir, I'd really like to hear about it :-)