At 11:17 AM -0400 8/24/99, Christopher Masto wrote:
I'm sure there are situations where mandatory locking accomplishes
something useful. Are they worth it? (I don't claim to know; if
the problems I thought I pointed out don't really exist, good.)
More seriously than just being a "useless" feature, I am concerned
about the possibility of opening up security holes with mandatory
locking. BSD Unix does not currently have it.. if I understand
correctly, the kind of locking we're talking about means that if I can
get another user to read a file I own, I can make them block
indefinately. Maybe I can't do anything bad with that.. maybe I can
"only" cause a denial of service.. or maybe I can make a new race
condition in a periodic script.
I am also concerned about the implementation, and about the opening
of denial-of-service attacks. How about we start talking about some
possible implementations, and see which ones will work the best?
Your position seems to be "it is possible that a bad implementation
of this might cause some security issues -- and therefore let's not
do it at all, even if it might be useful". My position is that "It
is useful, and demonstrated as useful on many OS's, so let us sit
down and figure out a good implementation".
---
Garance Alistair Drosehn = g...@eclipse.acs.rpi.edu
Senior Systems Programmer or dro...@rpi.edu
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
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