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netsec_burn11/08/20241 replyview on HN

I can answer the writing to /proc one. It is sometimes useful to hotpatch running programs with /proc/pid/mem.


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tetha11/08/2024

And that's what I'm getting at, and where I'd like the community to improve in discussions. In what context do you need it, and how much, and what would your alternatives be?

Because, the amount of different contexts linux is being used in, and the different threat levels are vastly different.

For example, I'm aware that the industrial and embedded world does wild things at times. Because it's hard to establish redundancy and replacability there. Because the system is attached to a $750k lathe. However, that thing is not networked, and physical access is controlled by people with guns. Do whatever you need to keep this thing running, as horrid as it may be.

On the other hand, I have a fleet of loadbalancers and their job is to accept traffic from all criminals in this world, and then some legitimate users as well. I can reset them to base linux and have them back operational in 10 minutes or so. Things modifying loaded code in memory outside of some very specific situations like service startup on these systems is terrifying and entirely not necessary.

So I would be very happy with a switch to turn that off, even though some other use cases wouldn't need it or wouldn't be able to use it at all.