On Sunday 01 April 2001 18:23, Ben Galehouse wrote:
> Edsel Adap wrote:
> > Very easy, just produce a lot of drive activity (can be accomplished by
> > extracting a fairly large tar file) and then turning the power off on the
> > system. The next time the system boots, fsck runs. While fsck is
> > running, turn of the power again, repeat a few times and eventually
> > you'll get errors which will require manual intervention.
>
> A DOS attack on a system which you have the ability to kill power to
> strikes me as a fairly minor problem. Being able to do this remotely

I realize that. However, the original poster (Philip Stoev) was describing
what happens when fsck runs (during boot-up) and then gives you a root shell.
The root shell only appears on the console. He therefore implied console
access... which usually means physical access to the system... Besides you
have other problems if there is console access to the system.

> would be another story. Hmmm... if you had some DOS which caused a
> kernel panic, performing it in the middle of lots of disk activity might
> be a good way to aggravate the DOS further.
>
> Any programatic attack would involve a kernel/filesystem bug of some
> sort. Question is how easy it is to audit for such.

--
Edsel Adap
edseladap.org
http://www.adap.org/~edsel/          LINUX - the choice of the GNU generation
"Netscape is an application which grows to fill all available memory."  - me

• Messages sorted by: [ date ] [ thread ] [ subject ] [ author ]