[Bug 1006398] Re: Bypassing ptrace restrictions for errors from hanging applications

[Steve Langasek]

Does the ability for a process to name its own debugger help any here?
It wouldn't do for all applications, but perhaps the standard toolkits
could be patched to support it.  From the wiki page:

  In the case of automatic crash handlers, a crashing process can specficially
  allow an existing crash handler process to attach on a process-by-process
  basis using prctl(PR_SET_PTRACER, debugger_pid, 0, 0, 0).

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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1006398

Title:
  Bypassing ptrace restrictions for errors from hanging applications

Status in “whoopsie-daisy” package in Ubuntu:
  New

Bug description:
  As part of the error reporting features in 12.10, we're adding the
  ability to generate reports from hanging applications. This requires
  that we can gdb attach and backtrace to an arbitrary PID running as
  the same user, which requires working around the restrictions set by
  the ptrace scope:

  https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Security/Features#ptrace

  A new plugin for compiz will be written to notify a new dbus service
  on the system bus that it should write a gdb backtrace for the pid
  (provided by the _NET_WM_PID xprop. This service will only accept
  connections from the compiz process. It will only accept the request
  if the PID was running with a valid session cookie (unless this is
  overkill?).

  How does that sound?

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