Five years ago I wrote about kernel based process hiding in Linux (see articles Simple process hiding kernel patch, Process hiding Kernel patch for 2.6.24.x, RSBAC – Kernel based process hiding). It got time to continue the story and finally present you a real solution without the hassle of a self-compiled kernel.
How can I prevent users from seeing processes that do not belong to them?
In January 2012, Vasiliy Kulikov came up with a kernel patch that solved the problem nicely by adding a hidepid
mount option for procfs. The patch landed in Linux kernel 3.3.
In the meantime, this patch luckily also landed in the 3.2 kernel of Debian Wheezy (see backport request in Debian bug report #669028). This feature has been also pushed back into the kernel of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.3 (see RHEL 6.3 Release Notes), and from there to CentOS 6.3 and Scientific Linux 6.3. Recently, this feature was even backported to the 2.6.18 kernel in RHEL 5.9.
As Proxmox VE currently runs on a RHEL based 2.6.32 kernel, it’s also supported in my favorite OpenVZ/KVM virtualization platform. Great!