Running programs are not affected by updating their files [LWN.net]

Running programs are not affected by updating their files

Posted Oct 5, 2023 8:38 UTC (Thu) by geert (subscriber, #98403)
In reply to: Running programs are not affected by updating their files by sdalley
Parent article: A local root vulnerability in glibc

In general, that is indeed true.
For this particular case, where the vulnerability is in the loader evaluating the GLIBC_TUNABLES environment variable, I guess the program is no longer vulnerable after it has been started.

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Running programs are not affected by updating their files

Posted Oct 5, 2023 11:51 UTC (Thu) by hmh (subscriber, #3838) [Link] (1 responses)

It all depends on what gets used for the dynamic loader on a running process. execve() should be fine, the kernel would load the newer, fixed dynamic linker anyway.

And if your environment is currently safe, only applications that allow changing it and which do something weird in userspace with a cached copy of ld.so might need a restart. Maybe dlopen()?

Running programs are not affected by updating their files

Posted Oct 5, 2023 12:45 UTC (Thu) by iustin (subscriber, #102433) [Link]

Exactly, I was referring to this specific issue, not in general.