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authorLinus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>2013-11-13 15:45:43 +0900
committerLinus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>2013-11-13 15:45:43 +0900
commit5cbb3d216e2041700231bcfc383ee5f8b7fc8b74 (patch)
treea738fa82dbcefa9bd283c08bc67f38827be63937 /Documentation/sysctl/kernel.txt
parent9bc9ccd7db1c9f043f75380b5a5b94912046a60e (diff)
parent4e9b45a19241354daec281d7a785739829b52359 (diff)
Merge branch 'akpm' (patches from Andrew Morton)
Merge first patch-bomb from Andrew Morton: "Quite a lot of other stuff is banked up awaiting further next->mainline merging, but this batch contains: - Lots of random misc patches - OCFS2 - Most of MM - backlight updates - lib/ updates - printk updates - checkpatch updates - epoll tweaking - rtc updates - hfs - hfsplus - documentation - procfs - update gcov to gcc-4.7 format - IPC" * emailed patches from Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>: (269 commits) ipc, msg: fix message length check for negative values ipc/util.c: remove unnecessary work pending test devpts: plug the memory leak in kill_sb ./Makefile: export initial ramdisk compression config option init/Kconfig: add option to disable kernel compression drivers: w1: make w1_slave::flags long to avoid memory corruption drivers/w1/masters/ds1wm.cuse dev_get_platdata() drivers/memstick/core/ms_block.c: fix unreachable state in h_msb_read_page() drivers/memstick/core/mspro_block.c: fix attributes array allocation drivers/pps/clients/pps-gpio.c: remove redundant of_match_ptr kernel/panic.c: reduce 1 byte usage for print tainted buffer gcov: reuse kbasename helper kernel/gcov/fs.c: use pr_warn() kernel/module.c: use pr_foo() gcov: compile specific gcov implementation based on gcc version gcov: add support for gcc 4.7 gcov format gcov: move gcov structs definitions to a gcc version specific file kernel/taskstats.c: return -ENOMEM when alloc memory fails in add_del_listener() kernel/taskstats.c: add nla_nest_cancel() for failure processing between nla_nest_start() and nla_nest_end() kernel/sysctl_binary.c: use scnprintf() instead of snprintf() ...
Diffstat (limited to 'Documentation/sysctl/kernel.txt')
-rw-r--r--Documentation/sysctl/kernel.txt25
1 files changed, 18 insertions, 7 deletions
diff --git a/Documentation/sysctl/kernel.txt b/Documentation/sysctl/kernel.txt
index 4273b2d71a27..26b7ee491df8 100644
--- a/Documentation/sysctl/kernel.txt
+++ b/Documentation/sysctl/kernel.txt
@@ -290,13 +290,24 @@ Default value is "/sbin/hotplug".
kptr_restrict:
This toggle indicates whether restrictions are placed on
-exposing kernel addresses via /proc and other interfaces. When
-kptr_restrict is set to (0), there are no restrictions. When
-kptr_restrict is set to (1), the default, kernel pointers
-printed using the %pK format specifier will be replaced with 0's
-unless the user has CAP_SYSLOG. When kptr_restrict is set to
-(2), kernel pointers printed using %pK will be replaced with 0's
-regardless of privileges.
+exposing kernel addresses via /proc and other interfaces.
+
+When kptr_restrict is set to (0), the default, there are no restrictions.
+
+When kptr_restrict is set to (1), kernel pointers printed using the %pK
+format specifier will be replaced with 0's unless the user has CAP_SYSLOG
+and effective user and group ids are equal to the real ids. This is
+because %pK checks are done at read() time rather than open() time, so
+if permissions are elevated between the open() and the read() (e.g via
+a setuid binary) then %pK will not leak kernel pointers to unprivileged
+users. Note, this is a temporary solution only. The correct long-term
+solution is to do the permission checks at open() time. Consider removing
+world read permissions from files that use %pK, and using dmesg_restrict
+to protect against uses of %pK in dmesg(8) if leaking kernel pointer
+values to unprivileged users is a concern.
+
+When kptr_restrict is set to (2), kernel pointers printed using
+%pK will be replaced with 0's regardless of privileges.
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