A C program which crashes the system(shuts down the system)?

It's easy to write a program that invokes undefined or implementation-defined behavior. Some of those programs could potentially crash the system.

It's easy to write a program that invokes undefined or implementation-defined behavior. Some of those programs could potentially crash the system. But by definition, this is inconsistent.

And modern OSes take pains (though not 100% successfully) to prevent a rogue app from crashing the system.

Thanks for the reply. What did you mean by "undefined or implementation-defined behavior"? Could you please explain.

– TechTigger Oct 3 at 6:05 @Venugopal, see this question. – Matthew Flaschen Oct 3 at 6:09.

There is no portable way to write a C program that crashes the system. A fork bomb might or might not bog down a system. Of course fork is not portable -- and a system can defend itself against such attacks by limiting the number of processes a given account can create.

Of course there's always this: #include int main(void) { puts("HEY YOU, PULL THE PLUG! "); return 0; }.

I would try writing garbage to /dev/kmem. There is a good chance that would cause an irrecoverable system crash.

There's also a good chance that a normal user will be unable to write to /dev/kmem; indeed, the system is very badly setup indeed if that is successful (as a normal user). As root, all bets are off: dd if=/dev/random of=/dev/kmem will probably do the trick quite nicely. – Jonathan Leffler Oct 3 at 6:45.

One way to do that is by exploiting "Privilege Escalation" vulnerabilities of the current system. Based on current configuration, you can search for vulnerabilities that impact the system. E.g.

Based on Kernel version. And then escalate privileges to root. Once the process is "root", it can shutdown the system in various ways.

Sending SIGPWR to "init" process is one clean way of doing that.

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