From owner-freebsd-ipfw Tue Jul 27 10:18:34 1999 Delivered-To: freebsd-ipfw@freebsd.org Received: from ns.mt.sri.com (ns.mt.sri.com [206.127.79.91]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 7729214E10; Tue, 27 Jul 1999 10:18:27 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from nate@mt.sri.com) Received: from mt.sri.com (rocky.mt.sri.com [206.127.76.100]) by ns.mt.sri.com (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id LAA15551; Tue, 27 Jul 1999 11:18:03 -0600 (MDT) (envelope-from nate@rocky.mt.sri.com) Received: by mt.sri.com (SMI-8.6/SMI-SVR4) id LAA25910; Tue, 27 Jul 1999 11:18:02 -0600 Date: Tue, 27 Jul 1999 11:18:02 -0600 Message-Id: <199907271718.LAA25910@mt.sri.com> From: Nate Williams MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit To: Matthew Dillon Cc: "Brian F. Feldman" , Joe Greco , hackers@FreeBSD.ORG, freebsd-ipfw@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: securelevel and ipfw zero In-Reply-To: <199907270348.UAA49943@apollo.backplane.com> References: <199907270348.UAA49943@apollo.backplane.com> X-Mailer: VM 6.34 under 19.16 "Lille" XEmacs Lucid Sender: owner-freebsd-ipfw@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG > ipfw allows you to clear counters. It is a feature that already exists. > > However, it does not allow you to do it if you are sitting at secure > level 3. > > Why not? I can't think of any good reason why clearing the counters > should be disallowed when sitting at a higher secure level. The counters > are nothing more then statistics. Clearing statistics is not a security > threat. I just thought of a bad thing. If you allowed the counters to be zero'd (or advanced) at securelevel == 3, then a 'malicious user' could write a cronjob to continually reset them and cause a DoS attack on the system (or in the case of advance, reset them to ridiculously high values), thus filling up the disk. However, one could argue that *IF* they have root, they could just as easily fill the disk with garbage and cause the same attack, ie; # dd if=/dev/zero of=/var/log/misc > The discussion should simply be about that. Not all this garbage > about adding new features. There's a feature that does not seem > to impact security, secure level disallows it, why? I'm not convinced there aren't other security implications from zero'ing (or advancing) the counters. Nate To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-ipfw" in the body of the message