[ubuntu-hardened] [kernel-hardening] Re: Add overflow protection to kref

[PaX Team]

On 24 Feb 2012 at 14:04, David Windsor wrote:

> Suggestions on recovering from an overflow here?

do what PaX does? :)

1. saturate the refcount
2. report the event (pax_report_refcount_overflow)
3. kill the triggering userland process (this may be optional but it's a good measure
   if you have stuff like grsecurity's lockout feature)

> 2. Detect the overflow before it happens, don't increment the counter,
> issue a warning but no BUG.
> This could also lead to some "undefined" behavior in subsystems.

it's called a memory leak :).