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Performing operations on device files intended only for ordinary character or binary files can result in crashes and denial-of-service (DoS) attacks. For example, when Windows attempts to interpret a device name as a file resource, it performs an invalid resource access that usually results in a crash Howard 2002.
Device files in POSIX can be a security risk when an attacker can trick a program into accessing them in an unauthorized way. For instance, if malicious programs can read or write to the /dev/kmem device file, they may be able to alter their own priority, user ID, or other attributes of their process or they may simply crash the system. Similarly, access to disk devices, tape devices, network devices, and terminals being used by other processes can also lead to problems Garfinkel 1996.
On Linux, it is possible to lock certain applications by attempting to read or write data on devices rather than files. Consider the following device path names:
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