Re: How to safely kill all processes owned by a user on macOS
Re: How to safely kill all processes owned by a user on macOS
- Subject: Re: How to safely kill all processes owned by a user on macOS
- From: Daniel Peebles <email@hidden>
- Date: Wed, 18 Oct 2017 12:48:28 +0000
Hi Alastair,
Yes, we did try with them first and they told us they didn’t consider it a
security issue, so we posted to oss-security after making sure Apple
understood we’d do that unless they asked us not to.
Thanks,
Dan
On Wed, Oct 18, 2017 at 06:31 Alastair Houghton <
email@hidden> wrote:
> > On 18 Oct 2017, at 02:24, Daniel Peebles <email@hidden> wrote:
> >
> > The obvious thing we tried before was to launch a new process, set(e)uid
> to the user in question, then kill(-1, SIGKILL). That will kill all running
> processes under that user (including the killer!), but unfortunately in
> High Sierra (and possibly earlier), it also crashes the entire system and
> I'm unsure how long it'll be until it's fixed:
> http://www.openwall.com/lists/oss-security/2017/10/12/1
>
> Has this been submitted to <email@hidden>? The ability to
> take out the system is quite clearly a security issue; there are Macs
> installed with guest user access, for instance, where this would be
> troublesome.
>
> > Does anyone have other ideas, possibly informed by obscure macOS
> internal behavior, for how to effectively kill all processes owned by a
> user?
>
> You could try killing just those processes in the same process group, if
> that’s sufficient for your purposes (i.e. kill(0, SIGKILL)). Of course,
> that may also trigger the bug, I don’t know.
>
> Alternatively, perhaps you can explain what you’re trying to achieve by
> killing all the processes belonging to a particular user? Maybe there’s
> something else you could do instead?
>
> Kind regards,
>
> Alastair.
>
> --
> http://alastairs-place.net
>
>
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