This is the mail archive of the
gdb@sources.redhat.com
mailing list for the GDB project.
Re: gdb and suid binaries - security?
- From: Michael Elizabeth Chastain <mec at shout dot net>
- To: gdb at sources dot redhat dot com, kewarken at qnx dot com
- Date: Wed, 3 Apr 2002 09:52:30 -0600
- Subject: Re: gdb and suid binaries - security?
This is a well known case. The kernel does a permission check at the
time that the parent starts tracing the child (or Process A attaches to
Process B). In the linux kernel, this check is in "ptrace_attach"
in file kernel/ptrace.c.
> Oddly enough I've noticed that this actually fails on both FreeBSD
> and Linux but it almost seems to be some mechanism outside of gdb.
> Does anyone know how this works?
gdb is an unprivileged process. It just calls ptrace() a lot, or it
reads and write /proc a lot. It's the kernel's job to deny gdb from
attaching to privileged processes, just as it's the kernel's job to deny
"cat > /etc/passwd" for unprivileged users.
Michael C