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In computing, a fork bomb (also called rabbit virus or wabbit) is a denial-of-service attack wherein a process continually replicates itself to deplete available system resources, slowing down or crashing the system due to resource starvation.
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History
Around 1978 an early variant of a fork bomb called wabbit was reported to run on a System/360. It may have descended from a similar attack called RABBITS reported from 1969 on a Burroughs 5500 at the University of Washington.
Implementation
Fork bombs operate both by consuming CPU time in the process of forking, and by saturating the operating system's process table. A basic implementation of a fork bomb is an infinite loop that repeatedly launches the same process.
In Unix-like operating systems, fork bombs are generally written to use the fork system call. As forked processes are also copies of the first program, once they resume execution from the next address at the frame pointer, they also seek to create a copy of themselves; this has the effect of causing an exponential growth in processes. As modern Unix systems generally use copy-on-write when forking new processes, a fork bomb generally will not saturate such a system's memory.
Microsoft Windows operating systems do not have an equivalent functionality to the Unix fork system call; a fork bomb on such an operating system must therefore create a new process instead of forking from an existing one.
Prevention
As a fork bomb's mode of operation is entirely encapsulated by creating new processes, one way of preventing a fork bomb from severely affecting the entire system is to limit the maximum number of processes that a single user may own. On Linux, this can be achieved by using the ulimit utility; for example, the command ulimit -u 30 would limit the affected user to a maximum of thirty owned processes. On PAM-enabled systems, this limit can also be set in /etc/security/limits.conf, and on FreeBSD, the system administrator can put limits in /etc/login.conf.