Messages in this thread | | | Date | Thu, 1 May 2014 08:06:02 +0400 | From | Solar Designer <> | Subject | Re: [patch] lib: check for strcpy() overflows to fixed length buffers |
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On Wed, Apr 30, 2014 at 06:08:44PM +0300, Dan Carpenter wrote: > There are sometimes where we know that we are doing an strcpy() into a > fixed length buffer. In those cases, we could verify that the strcpy() > doesn't overflow. This patch introduces DEBUG_STRICT_SLOW_STRCPY_CHECKS > if you want to check for that.
FWIW, I had posted similar macros for userland strcpy() and friends to the security-audit list (now defunct) in 1998. Someone preserved a copy here (although the indentation is lost):
http://www.opennet.ru/soft/0432.html
In (weird) use, with proper indentation:
http://www.merit.edu/mail.archives/nanog/2000-02/msg00366.html https://github.com/tureba/trinoo/blob/master/strfix.h
Personally, I was using this at the time for building known-broken software like wu-ftpd, where the risk of false positives felt lower than the risk of buffer overflow bugs being in fact present in the code.
I used gcc's Statement Exprs extension, which is also used in the Linux kernel a lot:
http://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gcc/Statement-Exprs.html
So maybe you should, too. (That is, if you want to go ahead with this approach for code that isn't meant to be as broken as wu-ftpd was.) This lets us propagate the original return value.
To determine the destination buffer size, I simply used sizeof() and skipped my added protection in case the size looked like that of a pointer. Now you have those nice new gcc features instead. :-)
> The downside is that it makes strcpy slower.
I guess the slowdown is mostly from the added strlen(). I avoided it by using strncat(), so I had truncation instead of detection. It is unclear which is better.
Other functions I did this for are strcat(), sprintf(), vsprintf().
Alexander
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