Slashdot Mirror
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."
I missed the last sentence of the blurb, which does address CFS in the latest Linux kernel...sorry about that. ... of course, Slashdot doesn't let you post a retraction right away.... grrr! ... Still waiting... ... this is getting old ...
Bravo, sir