Le 2015-05-26 16:25, Theo de Raadt a écrit :
Le 2015-05-26 00:10, Miod Vallat a =C3=A9crit=C2=A0:
> It is not the responsibility of the operating system to protect its
> users against software which assumes using the pid as a random source=
=20
> is
> a bright and wise idea.
=20
Isn't this the whole goal of random PIDs, to put a defense at OS level=20 protecting software against themselves when they make wrong assumption=20
regarding the PID and use it for wrong purposes?

A 16 bit PID is suppsed to provide true safety?

Please.

The problem is people who believe that shoving a 16 bit value into
a deterministic function gets them somewhere.

So do you confirm that random PID is actually not a security measure?

It is often presented as is, but it would not be the first time that some wrong rumors get widespread enough to become accepted as a truth by most people.

I could also easily imagine that PID have been randomized just because it was allowed to do so and that it was interesting from the coding perspective as showing up software bugs that sequential PID would hardly uncover (I'm mainly referring here to Ted Unangst's talk: http://www.openbsd.org/papers/dev-sw-hostile-env.html, see "randomization" section, backed by the "philosophy" section: "The sooner we can break it, the sooner we can fix it").

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