Bugtraq: Re: ps information leak in FreeBSD

[Sean Kelly <smkelly () zombie org>]

On Tue, Jan 07, 2003 at 09:18:00AM +0000, Jez Hancock wrote:
...
> It's annoying in that I see a lot of users running mysql with the -u and -p options:
>
> mysql -u user -p mypassword
>
> on the commandline, thinking that this info will not show up in ps listings when ps
> is run by other users.  Ho hum...
As has already been pointed out, this is something that the application
should deal with. Despite this, FreeBSD also has a sysctl knob which will
protect against this.

(2) root:~$ sysctl kern.ps_argsopen=0
kern.ps_argsopen: 1 -> 0

This will prevent exactly the problem you describe, by making arguments not
viewable to other users (excluding root). IT also appears to take effect in
/proc, such as /proc/<pid>/cmdline.

This is present in FreeBSD 4.7-STABLE, at least.

-- 
Sean Kelly         | PGP KeyID: D2E5E296
smkelly () zombie org | http://www.zombie.org

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