Messages in this thread | | | Date | Wed, 11 Jun 2014 00:12:43 -0400 | From | Rich Felker <> | Subject | recvmmsg/sendmmsg result types inconsistent, integer overflows? |
| |
While looking to add support for the recvmmsg and sendmmsg syscalls in musl libc, I ran into some disturbing findings on the kernel side. In the struct mmsghdr, the field where the result for each message is stored has type int, which is inconsistent with the return type ssize_t of recvmsg/sendmsg. So I tried to track down what happens when the result is or would be larger than 2GB, and quickly found an explanation for why the type in the structure was defined wrong: internally, the kernel uses int as the return type for revcmsg and sendmsg. Oops.
A bit more RTFS'ing brought me to tcp_sendmsg in net/ipv4/tcp.c (I figured let's look at a stream-based protocol, since datagrams can likely never be that big for any existing protocol), and as far as I can tell, it's haphazardly mixing int and size_t with no checks for overflows. I looked for anywhere the kernel might try to verify before starting that the sum of the lengths of all the iovec components doesn't overflow INT_MAX or even SIZE_MAX, but didn't find any such checks.
Is there some magic that makes this all safe, or is this a big mess of possibly-security-relevant bugs?
Rich
| |