Mike Tierney wrote
"A hotfix for this vulnerability is to disallow processes to drop core. This can be accomplished by setting the hard core size limit for users to 0 (e.g. ulimit -H -c 0, man limits.conf)." But you can't do that in a running system. It won't affect running shells of normal users. So you need to reboot, and then you would need to reboot again to allow cores again. So it's easier to reboot only once with a patched kernel...
Well on Friday you did say "I just want a quick fix for now and don't mind to upgrade again after you've released the official update, possibly with more fixes."
Yes, you are right. But if the offical update does not contain more important fixes, I've one reboot less ;-) Anyway, thanks for caring! Don't take that wrong!
And given that there wasn't a SuSE patched kernel available, I gave you a "quick fix". The fact that it requires a small outage just means that it isn't the best solution for anyone running a 24x7 operation. However if a 10 minute outage decreases the chance you'll get hacked then you need to weight up the pro's and con's of doing this (or not).
Sure! The problem here is that we sth. like time windows in which we can reboot because we have processes running for weeks, doing important and uninterruptable computations. So if I have a chance to save one reboot, I try that :-) An inofficial kernel patch has a greater change for saving one reboot (hoping nothing else needs to be fixed).
This vulnerability is only a problem if someone actually gains local access to your system in the first place. Of course for all you know maybe someone has already hacked your application layer and is just waiting to use this new exploit to escalate themselves!
Right, I think that's the bigger problem. If e.g. apache has some new and easily exploitable flaw that is detected tomorrow, then the core problem suddenly is a remote exploit problem. cu, Frank -- Dipl.-Inform. Frank Steiner Web: http://www.bio.ifi.lmu.de/~steiner/ Lehrstuhl f. Bioinformatik Mail: http://www.bio.ifi.lmu.de/~steiner/m/ LMU, Amalienstr. 17 Phone: +49 89 2180-4049 80333 Muenchen, Germany Fax: +49 89 2180-99-4049 * Rekursion kann man erst verstehen, wenn man Rekursion verstanden hat. *