Secretly Monopolizing the CPU Without Being Root

An anonymous reader writes "This year's Usenix security symposium includes a paper that implements a "cheat" utility, which allows any non-privileged user to run his/her program, e.g., like so 'cheat 99% program' thereby insuring that the programs would get 99% of the CPU cycles, regardless of the presence of any other applications in the system, and in some cases (like Linux), in a way that keeps the program invisible from CPU monitoring tools (like 'top'). The utility exclusively uses standard interfaces and can be trivially implemented by any beginner non-privileged programmer. Recent efforts to improve the support for multimedia applications make systems more susceptible to the attack. All prevalent operating systems but Mac OS X are vulnerable, though by this kerneltrap story, it appears that the new CFS Linux scheduler attempts to address the problem that were raised by the paper."

Comments

Re:What does this mean?

[networkBoy]

Why not leave the post but allow a "retracted" tickbox? Thus at least the owner of the comment can effectively say "I was wrong, boneheaded, whatever" without having to post another comment and wait two minutes to do it? and all that shows up it a one-liner under the comment:
This comment has been retracted by its poster

-nB