Bugtraq mailing list archives
Re: core symlinks
From: mouse () Collatz McRCIM McGill EDU (der Mouse)
Date: Fri, 26 Aug 1994 06:23:31 -0400
It's been mentioned before that core dumps on some systems may follow symlink and that this can be used to overwrite any file. I was wondering if anyone knows which OS's and versions behave this way.
I believe that SunOS does not have this problem. The procedure for crashing SunOS is to first dump core into the swap space. After successfully writing to swap, it attempts to find a place on any of the mounted partitions which will facilitate the core file. If it does find a place, it will copy the core file from swap to that area, otherwise it will not. Hense, I don't think that symlinks are relevant to this problem.
First, this doesn't match any SunOS version I've ever seen; they all have a specific place, passed as an argument to savecore, and if there isn't room there, they don't go looking for room elsewhere. Perhaps some imaginative person has attacked your rc scripts with an editor to go looking for space before running savecore? Second, it's completely irrelevant to the discussion, because we were talking about ordinary coredumps from programs getting signals like SEGV or QUIT, not kernel coredumps from OS crashes. der Mouse mouse () collatz mcrcim mcgill edu
Current thread:
- Re: core symlinks Jules van Weerden (Aug 26)
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- Re: core symlinks der Mouse (Aug 26)