fork bomb attack

[Lawrence Bowie]

I agree. I think the default is 16384.

on RHEL 3, Fedora and SuSE it really slows the server down as a normal 
user and
it takes a few for the server to recover.

I guess a "good" security conscience admin. can possibly prevent such 
slowdown but
it would be nice for it to come from the vendor or the community first. :)


Thanks,

LDB

Michael Schwendt wrote:

>On Fri, 18 Mar 2005 20:37:39 +0100, Ralf Ertzinger wrote:
>
>  
>
>>Hi.
>>
>>Dave Jones <davej at redhat.com> wrote:
>>
>>    
>>
>>>If we set strict ulimits by default we'd have people writing articles
>>>like "Fedora is teh suck, I can't malloc more than xMB in a single
>>>process" What's fit for one configuration may not be for another.
>>>One size most definitly does not fit all.
>>>      
>>>
>>Especially as the article is quite uninformative about the resource
>>that was exhausted. My FD has a ulimit on the number of processes,
>>and I did not set that, and it has been this way for some time, I think.
>>    
>>
>
>The default ulimit on max user processes is so high, it doesn't serve as
>protection. An admin must find much tighter limits to make a box more
>secure against fork bomb DoS attacks.
>
>  
>