This is a Linux-specific trick that I'm quite fond of: I've used it
before in 'agedu' and a lot of my unpublished personal scriptery.
Suppose you want to run a listening network server in such a way that
it can only accept connections from processes under your own control.
Often it's not convenient to do this by adding an authentication step
to the protocol itself (either because the password management gets
hairy or because the protocol is already well defined). The 'right'
answer is to switch from TCP to Unix-domain sockets, because then you
can use the file permissions on the path leading to the socket inode
to ensure that no other user id can connect to it - but that's often
inconvenient as well, because if any _client_ of the server is not
already prepared to speak AF_UNIX your control then you can only trick
it into connecting to an AF_UNIX socket instead of TCP by applying a
downstream patch or resorting to LD_PRELOAD shenanigans.
But on Linux, there's an alternative shenanigan available, in the form
of /proc/net/tcp (or tcp6), which lists every currently active TCP
endpoint known to the kernel, and for each one, lists an owning uid.
Listen on localhost only. Then, when a connection comes in, look up
the far end of it in that file and see if the owning uid is the right
one!
I've always vaguely wondered if there would be uses for this trick in
PuTTY. One potentially useful one might be to protect the listening
sockets created by local-to-remote port forwarding. But for the
moment, I'm only planning to use it for a less security-critical
purpose, which will appear in the next commit.
