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- From: dcm@codesmith.austin.ibm.com (Craig Miller - dcm@austin.ibm.com)
- Subject: Re: process numbers
- Sender: news@austin.ibm.com (News id)
- Message-ID: <C0EB6D.174w@austin.ibm.com>
- Date: Tue, 5 Jan 1993 19:23:01 GMT
- References: <GEUDER.92Dec21195041@priamos.informatik.uni-stuttgart.de> <BzMqs8.1Krz@austin.ibm.com> <1h6hv0INNrsl@life.ai.mit.edu>
- Organization: IBM AWD, Austin
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-
- In article <1h6hv0INNrsl@life.ai.mit.edu> mycroft@hal.gnu.ai.mit.edu (Charles Hannum) writes:
- >
- >In article <BzMqs8.1Krz@austin.ibm.com> curt@ekhadafi.austin.ibm.com
- >(Curt Finch 903 2F021 curt@aixwiz.austin.ibm.com 512-838-2806) writes:
- >>
- >> My understanding is that it was done for security reasons.
- >
- >This is nonsense.
-
- Uh, wait a minute Charles... Many moons ago during the
- early development days of AIX, there was a rumor circulating
- around AIX development that generating sequential pids was
- a security hole. I think the phrase used was "covert channel".
-
- Perhaps that has changed since, but saying that anything
- Curt says is "nonsense" is going a bit overboard, don't you
- think? He was in AIX development back then. Were you?
-
- >The process number is the process table index shifted 8 bits, plus a
- >number which is incremented every time a process is put in that slot.
-
- True. But this doesn't prove that Curt's statement is wrong.
- AIX still doesn't generate sequential pids.
-
- >This is actually fairly useful. When I want to spy on a process with
- >`crash', it's easy to calculate the index into the process table which
- >I need for the `u' command.
-
- I always looked at the output from the 'proc' subcommand, then
- used the slot number for 'u'.....
-
- > \ / Charles Hannum, mycroft@ai.mit.edu
- --
- Craig Miller, software mechanic: AIXV3 Change Team (Level3 support)
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