Version vom 13. Dezember 2013, 22:05 Uhr

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Brittle Operating Systems

It's hard to believe how brittle modern Operating Systems still are. After years of development and refinement, you would expect most mainstream OSes to have reached a reasonable level of robustness and security. However, a simple fork bomb easily brings most OSes down.

It is as if the concept of denial of service would not belong in the software security category. Apparently, responsiveness does not fit into the OS writers' idea of software robustness either.

Admittedly, the simplest standard fork bomb does not do the trick any more, as most OSes nowadays limit the maximum number of child processes per session. However, it takes about a minute to write an enhanced version that still works, here it is:

#!/bin/bash

ENABLE_BOMB=true
ENABLE_PRINT_LEN=false

TEST="ab"

bomb() {

  if $ENABLE_BOMB; then
    bomb &
  fi

  TEST="$TEST$TEST"

  echo $TEST >/dev/null
  echo >/dev/null

  if $ENABLE_PRINT_LEN; then
    echo "TEST string length: ${#TEST}"
  fi

  bomb
};

bomb

I left a little extra code inside so that you can comfortably experiment with it. Just save it to a file called "ForkBomb-WARNING-may-crash-your-computer.sh", start it as follows and watch your OS slowly grind to a halt:

bash ForkBomb-WARNING-may-crash-your-computer.sh

That's it. You don't need to be logged on as superuser or change any special system configuration setting.

Your system may not technically die, it will probably start thrashing so much that it quickly becomes unusable. On the other hand, some systems become unstable when they run out of memory. The OS kernel itself may be robust enough to cope, but you need many other system services in order to use your computer effectively, and chances are that at least one of them will start to fail and may not recover even if enough memory becomes available later on.

I have seen that little script bring the following systems down:

• Microsoft Windows Vista (under Cygwin).
  You get a low-memory warning which does not really help to deal with the problem. If you don't wait too long, you can log out and after a while you will get your system back.
• Apple OS X.
  Some things still worked, like the moving window animations or the system menu, but nothing else really worked. Pressing Ctrl+C in the terminal window seems to stop the script but does not actually help. Trying to log out has no effect either.
• Kubuntu 13.10.
  Tested on a Konsole window. The mouse pointers starts to jerk around and within 5 seconds the computer is frozen solid. None of the usual key combinations works any more.

Please do drop me a line if you try it on other OSes, so that I can update the list above. Did you find one that resists the script in its default configuration?