Secure Pre-forking - A Pattern for Performance and Security
Munawar Hafiz · 2005
In a multi-tasking environment, the standard practices for performance improvement are pre-forking and resource pooling [11] of processes. However, if the processes in the resource pool have infinite lifetime, a malicious attacker can utilize this feature by compromising one process and then using it to attack and compromise other processes. This paper presents a performance and security pattern for resource pooling. The secure pre-forking pattern prescribes that limited lifetime is an essential feature for the processes in the resource pool. Older processes are periodically evicted from the resource pool and new processes are spawned in their place. This pattern therefore mitigates the trade-off between performance and security.