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kernel: make /proc/kallsyms mode 400 to reduce ease of attacking
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Making /proc/kallsyms readable only for root by default makes it
slightly harder for attackers to write generic kernel exploits by
removing one source of knowledge where things are in the kernel.

This is the second submit, discussion happened on this on first submit
and mostly concerned that this is just one hole of the sieve ...  but
one of the bigger ones.

Changing the permissions of at least System.map and vmlinux is also
required to fix the same set, but a packaging issue.

Target of this starter patch and follow ups is removing any kind of
kernel space address information leak from the kernel.

[ Side note: the default of root-only reading is the "safe" value, and
  it's easy enough to then override at any time after boot.  The /proc
  filesystem allows root to change the permissions with a regular
  chmod, so you can "revert" this at run-time by simply doing

    chmod og+r /proc/kallsyms

  as root if you really want regular users to see the kernel symbols.
  It does help some tools like "perf" figure them out without any
  setup, so it may well make sense in some situations.  - Linus ]

Signed-off-by: Marcus Meissner <[email protected]>
Acked-by: Tejun Heo <[email protected]>
Acked-by: Eugene Teo <[email protected]>
Reviewed-by: Jesper Juhl <[email protected]>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <[email protected]>
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msmeissn authored and torvalds committed Nov 17, 2010
1 parent 1d66365 commit 59365d1
Showing 1 changed file with 1 addition and 1 deletion.
2 changes: 1 addition & 1 deletion kernel/kallsyms.c
Original file line number Diff line number Diff line change
Expand Up @@ -546,7 +546,7 @@ static const struct file_operations kallsyms_operations = {

static int __init kallsyms_init(void)
{
proc_create("kallsyms", 0444, NULL, &kallsyms_operations);
proc_create("kallsyms", 0400, NULL, &kallsyms_operations);
return 0;
}
device_initcall(kallsyms_init);

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