3 ms·

I guess, as long as the IDS senses the attack in progress quickly -- my gut is this type of attack would be hard to detect until the outcome was achieved. Mor

I guess, as long as the IDS senses the attack in progress quickly -- my gut is this type of attack would be hard to detect until the outcome was achieved. More likely the initial entry would be the detected event(s) -- in which case yeah the extra time gives some safety net. In either case, it still feels like pulling all things into systemd creates a much harder to protect surface area on systems. Why should init care if your logger crashes, let alone take down init with it? I am not a anti-systemd person but I honestly do see the tradeoffs of the "let me do it all" architecture as a huge penalty.

fao_ 8y ago
> In either case, it still feels like pulling all things into systemd creates a much harder to protect surface area on systems. Why should init care if your logger crashes, let alone take down init with it? I am not a anti-systemd person but I honestly do see the tradeoffs of the "let me do it all" architecture as a huge penalty. 100% this. Also, as I understand it the exploit would not exist if it was literally just outputting log lines to a file in /var/log/systemd/ ? EDIT: Also as I understand it, appending directly to a file is just as stable as the journald approach, given that many, many disk controllers and kernels are known to lie about whether they have actually flushed their cache to disk (actually moreso, because the binary format of journald is arguably more difficult to recover into proper form than a timestamped plaintext -- please correct me if I'm wrong, though!!)
- viraptor 8y ago
  > the binary format of journald is arguably more difficult to recover into proper form than a timestamped plaintext -- please correct me if I'm wrong, though!! It depends what you mean by recover. To get the basic plaintext, you can pretty much run "strings" on the journal file and grep for "MESSAGE=". It's append-only so the entries are in order. Just because it's a binary file doesn't mean the text itself is mangled. (Unless you enable compression) The reference may look complicated https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/systemd/journal-files/ https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/systemd/journal-fi... but that's all extra features you may ignore for "recovery in emergency".
viraptor 8y ago
> Why should init care if your logger crashes It cares in the same way it cares about all the other processes. There's nothing systemd-specific here. Journald service is configured to restart of crash, same as many other services. It's not taking down init when journald crashes either.
- dane-pgp 8y ago
  > There's nothing systemd-specific here. Well, except journald itself.
loeg 8y ago
> Why should init care if your logger crashes, let alone take down init with it? They're separate processes. Logger crashes do not take down init. > I am not a anti-systemd person Whether you are or not, you are (inadvertently) repeating misinformation about it.

fao_ 8y ago

> In either case, it still feels like pulling all things into systemd creates a much harder to protect surface area on systems. Why should init care if your logger crashes, let alone take down init with it? I am not a anti-systemd person but I honestly do see the tradeoffs of the "let me do it all" architecture as a huge penalty. 100% this. Also, as I understand it the exploit would not exist if it was literally just outputting log lines to a file in /var/log/systemd/ ? EDIT: Also as I understand it, appending directly to a file is just as stable as the journald approach, given that many, many disk controllers and kernels are known to lie about whether they have actually flushed their cache to disk (actually moreso, because the binary format of journald is arguably more difficult to recover into proper form than a timestamped plaintext -- please correct me if I'm wrong, though!!)

viraptor 8y ago
> the binary format of journald is arguably more difficult to recover into proper form than a timestamped plaintext -- please correct me if I'm wrong, though!! It depends what you mean by recover. To get the basic plaintext, you can pretty much run "strings" on the journal file and grep for "MESSAGE=". It's append-only so the entries are in order. Just because it's a binary file doesn't mean the text itself is mangled. (Unless you enable compression) The reference may look complicated https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/systemd/journal-files/ https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/systemd/journal-fi... but that's all extra features you may ignore for "recovery in emergency".

viraptor 8y ago

> Why should init care if your logger crashes It cares in the same way it cares about all the other processes. There's nothing systemd-specific here. Journald service is configured to restart of crash, same as many other services. It's not taking down init when journald crashes either.

dane-pgp 8y ago
> There's nothing systemd-specific here. Well, except journald itself.

loeg 8y ago

> Why should init care if your logger crashes, let alone take down init with it? They're separate processes. Logger crashes do not take down init. > I am not a anti-systemd person Whether you are or not, you are (inadvertently) repeating misinformation about it.