ee using 99% cpu after user ssh session terminates abnormaly

Craig Edwards brain at winbot.co.uk
Wed Sep 7 16:00:49 PDT 2005


I can duplicate this with nano on freebsd 5.4 and 5.2.1

It seems that the process ignores the HUP signal maybe or ignores the 
EOF condition on stdin, and the select loop, or whatever it uses, just 
loops infinitely with nothing to read, constantly returning an error 
condition.

At least this is what i suspect happens. Lazy programming somewhere...

Thanks
Craig Edwards

Brooks Davis wrote:
> On Thu, Sep 08, 2005 at 08:27:13AM +1000, talonz wrote:
> 
>>Recently i have been using a dialup 56k account to access the net
>>and have noticed that when my ssh session times out and I am editing
>>a file in ` ee ' the system goes to 99% cpu usage and stays like
>>this till the pid is killed.
>>This is a standard user account (not root/su)
>>
>>Would a user be able to create a denial of service condition
>>on the remote system using this bug?
> 
> 
> No more then they could with the ablity to run any other program that
> loops.
> 
> 
>>(sorry if this is posted to the incorrect list)
>>
>>Details:
>>
>>System - FreeBSD 5.4-RELEASE-p5
>>
>>ee using 99% cpu after user session terminates abnormaly
>>PID reported by top.
>>
>>The output from ps looks like this
>>
>>[root at blah][~]$ ps aux| grep 70464
>>someuser 70464 93.5 0.1 1920 1372 p1- R 7:09PM 687:07.27 ee file
> 
> 
> I can't seem to trigger this bug on a 7.0 machine either by killing the
> client or using tcpdrop to kill the tcp session.
> 
> -- Brooks
> 


More information about the freebsd-security mailing list