So that:
- Only process owners, and root, can access information about their processes,
- Or, at the very least, cmdline permissions are only readable by root, and
- My system (CentOS 6.x) still runs
Why do I care?
I was just talking to a few developers who I think of as knowledgeable people, and only one out of the three of them knew that, by default, command line arguments for running programs are world-readable.
Incidentally, the topic came up because I was mocking one of them (my brother) for passing a password via command line and he didn't get it, and now I'm worried idiots well meaning but misguided developers might have written programs I actually use, and my authentication tokens might be stupidly and wantonly passed via command line by some of the OSS I have running on my box.
Extra credit
If you could provide solutions for other *nix flavors that don't use /proc but do allow command-line listings (e.g. FreeBSD) , that would be much appreciated.