Re: scary, maybe

On Wed, 16 Oct 2002, Sam Halliday wrote:

> yeah, youre completely correct, i should have checked for that also in
> the directory check! but it still finds vulnerable files and other
> directories... i have not done anything out of the ordinary on my
> system, but there were, to my surprise, a few files which somehow got
> installed group writable! (man/info pages mostly). i seen this as a big
> hole as you could easily perform a DoS attack on a hard disk by doing
> something like catting /dev/random to a file until the physical space is
> all used up.

If you're like most people and have made /tmp part of the root filesystem,
you're already vulnerable to that kind of "resource starvation" attack.
It wouldn't even be necessary (or logical) to use /dev/random for the
source, when /dev/zero will spit out lots and lots of nothing on demand.

...and unless you went out of your way to make the system reserve 0% of
the filesystem for use by root, a user trying that wouldn't be able to
kill the system--just piss off the other users.

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