On Sat, Mar 23, 2013 at 14:19, Todd C. Miller wrote: > On Sat, 23 Mar 2013 06:55:40 -0400, Ted Unangst wrote: > >> this hides more kernel pointers in the kinfo proc struct and >> introduces a backdoor for the kmem group. also hoist the permission >> test up out of the loops. > > Why should we have a backdoor for the group kmem? There are several > programs installed setgid kmem and this could expose those pointers > though them.
Anything that's kmem, can by that fact alone, see all these pointers. It can even follow them and read their contents. The reason for the change is that some programs, like procmap, use a combination of kmem and sysctl to get information. I'd really hate to rewrite them to do *more* kmem grovelling, because of a mistaken safeguard in sysctl.
