FreeBSD 4.5 and earlier, and possibly other BSD-based operating systems, allows local users to write to or read from restricted files by closing the file descriptors 0 (standard input), 1 (standard output), or 2 (standard error), which may then be reused by a called setuid process that intended to perform I/O on normal files.

The asynchronous I/O facility in 4.4 BSD kernel does not check user credentials when setting the recipient of I/O notification, which allows local users to cause a denial of service by using certain ioctl and fcntl calls to cause the signal to be sent to an arbitrary process ID.