Bug#841447: md5deep: sudo md5deep -rel /* leads to system crash

[debian.axhn@manchmal.in-ulm.de (Christoph Biedl)]

Control: tags 841447 moreinfo

[ disclaimer: Not the maintainer speaking ]

Julian Schwarz wrote...

> "md5deep -rel /*" crashes my system (reboot) with a for me unkown
> reason. "sha256deep -rel /*" crashes in the same way. This was tested
> on two different machines running debian stable and one machine
> running debian unstable all showing the same issue.

Running such a program on / seems like a bad idea as md5deep will
happily traverse into pseudo-filesystems like /sys/ or /proc/.
Especially if you run with sudo as suggested in your subject, I wasn't
surprised if strange things happen.

Stil, a crash is not acceptable. However, I could not reproduce the
issue.

> A "md5deep -rel /* >> log.txt 2>&1" seems to run without crashing the
> system. While running "md5deep -rel /* >> log.txt" the log.txt showed
> that it crashed on reading a file in /home/user and the file ending
> constisted out of NULLS, but a "md5deep -rel /home/*" runs without any
> problem.

Can you clarify a bit? The file content consists solely of NUL bytes? My
gut feeling tells me there's a problem with some characters in the file
name, perhaps there's a weird one close to your suspect? Was it possible
for you to share it?

Running md5deep under gdb would give a lot of helpful information but
I'm not sure whether you know how to do that.

    Christoph

-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 819 bytes
Desc: Digital signature
URL: <http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/forensics-devel/attachments/20161220/6a4aa897/attachment.sig>