After a short correspondence with Otto Moerbeek it turned out
mallocarray() is only in the OpenBSD-Kernel, because the kernel-
malloc doesn't have realloc.
Userspace applications should rather use reallocarray with an
explicit NULL-pointer.
Assuming reallocarray() will become available in c-stdlibs in the
next few years, we nip mallocarray() in the bud to allow an easy
transition to a system-provided version when the day comes.
A function used only in the OpenBSD-Kernel as of now, but it surely
provides a helpful interface when you just don't want to make sure
the incoming pointer to erealloc() is really NULL so it behaves
like malloc, making it a bit more safer.
Talking about *allocarray(): It's definitely a major step in code-
hardening. Especially as a system administrator, you should be
able to trust your core tools without having to worry about segfaults
like this, which can easily lead to privilege escalation.
How do the GNU coreutils handle this?
$ strings -n 4611686018427387903
strings: invalid minimum string length -1
$ strings -n 4611686018427387904
strings: invalid minimum string length 0
They silently overflow...
In comparison, sbase:
$ strings -n 4611686018427387903
mallocarray: out of memory
$ strings -n 4611686018427387904
mallocarray: out of memory
The first out of memory is actually a true OOM returned by malloc,
whereas the second one is a detected overflow, which is not marked
in a special way.
Now tell me which diagnostic error-messages are easier to understand.
Stateless and I stumbled upon this issue while discussing the
semantics of read, accepting a size_t but only being able to return
ssize_t, effectively lacking the ability to report successful
reads > SSIZE_MAX.
The discussion went along and we came to the topic of input-based
memory allocations. Basically, it was possible for the argument
to a memory-allocation-function to overflow, leading to a segfault
later.
The OpenBSD-guys came up with the ingenious reallocarray-function,
and I implemented it as ereallocarray, which automatically returns
on error.
Read more about it here[0].
A simple testcase is this (courtesy to stateless):
$ sbase-strings -n (2^(32|64) / 4)
This will segfault before this patch and properly return an OOM-
situation afterwards (thanks to the overflow-check in reallocarray).
[0]: http://www.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/man.cgi/OpenBSD-current/man3/calloc.3
This is a particularly interesting program.
I managed to implement everything according to POSIX except how
octal escapes are specified in the standard, which is yet another
format compared to the one demanded for tr(1).
This not only confuses people, it also adds unnecessary cruft
for no real gain.
So in order to be able to use unescape() easily and for consistency,
I used our initial format \o[oo] instead of \0[ooo].
Marked as optional is UTF-8 support for %c in the POSIX specification.
Given how well-developed libutf has become, doing this here was more
or less trivial, putting us yet again ahead of the competition.
Hiltjo Posthuma
FRIGN
sin