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posted by CoolHand on Wednesday October 05 2016, @12:46AM   Printer-friendly
from the love-for-lennart dept.

Security researcher and MateSSL founder, Andrew Ayer has uncovered a bug which will either crash or make systemd unstable (depending on who you talk to) on pretty much every linux distro. David Strauss posted a highly critical response to Ayer. In true pedantic nerd-fight fashion there is a bit of back and forth between them over the "true" severity of the issue and what not.

Nerd fights aside, how you feel about this bug, will probably largely depend on how you feel about systemd in general.

The following command, when run as any user, will crash systemd:

NOTIFY_SOCKET=/run/systemd/notify systemd-notify ""

After running this command, PID 1 is hung in the pause system call. You can no longer start and stop daemons. inetd-style services no longer accept connections. You cannot cleanly reboot the system. The system feels generally unstable (e.g. ssh and su hang for 30 seconds since systemd is now integrated with the login system). All of this can be caused by a command that's short enough to fit in a Tweet.

Edit (2016-09-28 21:34): Some people can only reproduce if they wrap the command in a while true loop. Yay non-determinism!


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  • (Score: 2) by sjames on Wednesday October 05 2016, @02:01AM

    by sjames (2882) on Wednesday October 05 2016, @02:01AM (#410454) Journal

    The assert covers unsanitized input, WTF?!?

    Starting Score:    1  point
    Karma-Bonus Modifier   +1  

    Total Score:   2  
  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 09 2016, @01:24PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 09 2016, @01:24PM (#412047)

    And it gets better...

    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12655048 [ycombinator.com]

    Not only does Poettering misrepresent what caused the issue, the git log shows he was the one that did the alterations that lead to the issue.