Recipe 13.9. Guarding Against Resource Starvation Attacks on Unix

13.9.1. Problem

You need to prevent resource starvation attacks against your application.

13.9.2. Solution

The operating system does not trust the applications that it allows to run. For this reason, the operating system imposes limits on certain resources. The limitations are imposed to prevent an application from using up all of the available system resources, thus denying other running applications the ability to run. The default limits are usually set much higher than they need to be, which ends up allowing any given application to use up far more resources than it ordinarily should.