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  • Eric W. Biederman's avatar
    [PATCH] Don't uselessly export task_struct to userspace in core dumps · a9289728
    Eric W. Biederman authored
    
    
    task_struct is an internal structure to the kernel with a lot of good
    information, that is probably interesting in core dumps.  However there is
    no way for user space to know what format that information is in making it
    useless.
    
    I grepped the GDB 6.3 source code and NT_TASKSTRUCT while defined is not
    used anywhere else.  So I would be surprised if anyone notices it is
    missing.
    
    In addition exporting kernel pointers to all the interesting kernel data
    structures sounds like the very definition of an information leak.  I
    haven't a clue what someone with evil intentions could do with that
    information, but in any attack against the kernel it looks like this is the
    perfect tool for aiming that attack.
    
    So since NT_TASKSTRUCT is useless as currently defined and is potentially
    dangerous, let's just not export it.
    
    (akpm: Daniel Jacobowitz <dan@debian.org> "would be amazed" if anything was
    using NT_TASKSTRUCT).
    
    Signed-off-by: default avatarEric W. Biederman <ebiederm@xmission.com>
    Signed-off-by: default avatarAndrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>
    Signed-off-by: default avatarLinus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
    a9289728