Oleg,

As others have pointed out, worrying about someone accessing database
shared memory is like worrying about an asteroid striking the earth and
wiping out all life.
It's a one in a billion chance compared to other security violations that
can occur.
You are better off concentrating on proper O/S security and user/table
permissions. That is how to implement database security!

On Wed, Dec 23, 2015 at 12:10 PM, oleg yusim <olegyu...@gmail.com> wrote:

> Thank you very much George, that is exactly the piece of information I was
> missing.
>
> Oleg
>
> On Wed, Dec 23, 2015 at 10:55 AM, George Neuner <gneun...@comcast.net>
> wrote:
>
>> Hi Oleg,
>>
>> On Wed, 23 Dec 2015 07:07:31 -0600, oleg yusim <olegyu...@gmail.com>
>> wrote:
>>
>> >May we run into situation, when attacker dumps memory and analyses it for
>> >valuable content, instead of reserving it for own process, where it would
>> >be zeroed? My understanding, it is a possibility. Does kernel have any
>> >safeguard against it?
>>
>> With recent kernels, by default there is no way for a userspace
>> process (even root) to dump memory.  Older kernels by default
>> permitted a root process unrestricted access to /dev/mem and
>> /dev/kmem, however in general that isn't needed and has long been
>> disabled by the mahor distros.  [see CONFIG_STRICT_DEVMEM].  IIRC, the
>> default setting was changed in 2011.
>>
>> With sufficient privileges, a debugger-like process can attach and
>> examine the memory of a running - or just terminated - process, but it
>> won't have access to discarded (unmapped) memory.
>>
>> The MAP_UNINITIALIZED trick, even if it works, is not a predictable
>> attack vector.  There is no way to ask for any *particular* VMM page -
>> mmap() just gives you a set of pages sufficient to cover the requested
>> address range ... you don't know what process those pages previously
>> belonged to.  Obviously there is a known algorithm for satisfying the
>> page requests, but the set of free pages includes both code and data
>> and depends on the history of system activity.  There's no guarantee
>> to get anything useful.
>>
>> I'm not sure any of this really answers your question.
>> George
>>
>>
>>
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>
>


-- 
*Melvin Davidson*
I reserve the right to fantasize.  Whether or not you
wish to share my fantasy is entirely up to you.

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