Securing a system with limits.conf

I'm not sure if this is off-topic for linux-kernel but here it goes...

After doing some research (Googling, checking Hardening Linux, Essential System Administration and a number of other books) I was quite shocked that configuring the limits doesn't seem to be documented anywhere. Sure, they all list the information that can be acquired by ulimit -a or man limits.conf but those oneliner descriptions of options fail to describe:

- What does the setting actually limit (one can find what the data segment or a core file is by Googling but it would be nicer if the documentation listed the security implications of each setting).

- What is the scope of the limit: per-user, per-process, all descendants of the current process, ...?

- How should things be configured to reliably prevent non-priveleged users from DoS'ing a machine.

Is there possibly some documentation that I have not found or is there actually a huge gap in the essential security documentation here?

Thanks.
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