Fork bombing a Linux machine as a non-root user

[Matthew Miller]

On Fri, Mar 18, 2005 at 01:08:31PM -0500, M.Rudra wrote:
> As a non-geek user I am concerned as I thought Linux is very secure. 
> So I googled "fork bombing" and after reading them, I have some doubts :

This isn't really a general security issue. If a user on your system does
this, find them and (metaphorically) smack them around.

If you want to prevent this from happening accidentally, or if you have a
critical server with users you don't trust (a situation to be avoided!) you
can _reduce_ the chances of something like this happening by configuring
resource limits, but since all computers do have finite resources, it's hard
to have a generally-useful shared machine without some possibility of
someone going out of their way to use more than their share.


-- 
Matthew Miller           mattdm at mattdm.org        <http://www.mattdm.org/>
Boston University Linux      ------>                <http://linux.bu.edu/>