Linux Shutdown in using the POSIX getrusage() function.

[poshtkohi]

Hi All

I have developed a userspace program similar to FTP protocol
that transfers files between a client and server in native C using
the POSIX userspace APIs.

I make use of the getrusage() function to profile my program in
source code level.

The server program is correctly running. However, the client program causes the system
to shut down; but when I remove the getrusage() function from the source code
in client side, everything is working well without any shutdown.

Has everybody any ideas of what is happening?

[Rubberman]

My guess is that the problem isn't with calling getrusage(), but somewhere else. In all likelihood, the second argument, a pointer to a 'struct rusage', is either bogus, or corrupted. If that structure is passed to the kernel, then it may well cause the sort of problem you describe. In any case, this is serious, as a user-space function like this should NOT have the ability to shutdown the system. It could be used as a denial of service attack. Please investigate further, and DO report it to the kernel developers. I can't emphasize this enough to you. You may well have stumbled upon a major security flaw in the operating system. BTW, what is the kernel you are using? Please post the output of 'uname -r' here asap.

Thanks.

[poshtkohi]

My guess is that the problem isn't with calling getrusage(), but somewhere else. In all likelihood, the second argument, a pointer to a 'struct rusage', is either bogus, or corrupted. If that structure is passed to the kernel, then it may well cause the sort of problem you describe. In any case, this is serious, as a user-space function like this should NOT have the ability to shutdown the system. It could be used as a denial of service attack. Please investigate further, and DO report it to the kernel developers. I can't emphasize this enough to you. You may well have stumbled upon a major security flaw in the operating system. BTW, what is the kernel you are using? Please post the output of 'uname -r' here asap.

Thanks.

There are two interesting points about this phenomenon!

1. The server also contains the getrusage() function, but it does not result in shutting down the server machine!

2. The client-side program is working well in some times and correctly reports the desired profiles contained in the reference of the passed structure rusage, but in nearly every 5 runs it randomly causes the client-side machine to unexpectedly shutdown !

The following log shows the Linux version used:

[root]# uname -r
2.6.9-100.ELsmp
[root]# uname -a
Linux ce.math 2.6.9-100.ELsmp #1 SMP Fri Feb 18 02:12:11 EST 2011 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux


I will more investigate the main reason of this negative bug, and will post the results here .

[Rubberman]

Build your application with the -g option and don't strip it, so you can run it in the debugger (gdb). Run it outside of gdb to see if it still crashes the system. If it does, then run it inside the debugger until it crashes again. You may find where things are getting munged. Also, check with dmesg and look in /var/log/messages to see if there was any kernel notifications of this event.