Re: question about /proc/<PID>/mem in 2.4

From: Arjan van de Ven
Date: Tue Jul 06 2004 - 05:51:10 EST


On Tue, 2004-07-06 at 13:14, Tigran Aivazian wrote:
> On Mon, 5 Jul 2004, FabF wrote:
> > > Surely, the super user (i.e. CAP_SYS_PTRACE in this context) should be
> > > allowed to read any process' memory without having to do the
> > > PTRACE_ATTACH/PTRACE_PEEKUSER kind of thing which strace(8) is doing?
> >
> > FYI may_ptrace_attach plugged somewhere between 2.4.21 & 22.This one get
> > used as is (ie without MAY_PTRACE) in proc_pid_environ but dunno about
> > reason why CAP_SYS_PTRACE isn't authoritative elsewhere.
>
> Ok, but still nobody seems to know why the super user is not allowed to
> access /proc/<PID>/mem of any task. Any code which nobody in the world
> knows the reason for, is broken and should be removed.
>
> I will wait a few weeks to see if someone does come up with the reason for
> that "extra secure" check in mem_read() and if nobody has objections I'll
> send Linus a patch to relax the check to a more reasonable one, namely to
> allow CAP_SYS_PTRACE process to bypass any other conditions imposed.

may I ask what the point is ?

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