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Message-ID: <fff2a470cad2d1e20acd125647100460@smtp.hushmail.com>
Date: Sun, 27 Jan 2013 20:08:29 +0100
From: magnum <john.magnum@...hmail.com>
To: john-dev@...ts.openwall.com
Subject: Re: getting rid of alloca() and variable-sized arrays
On 27 Jan, 2013, at 18:54 , Solar Designer <solar@...nwall.com> wrote:
> On Sun, Jan 27, 2013 at 06:43:10PM +0100, magnum wrote:
>> For portability reasons, or some other reason as well?
>
> Also for reliability and (maybe later) for security reasons. (I said
> "maybe later" because JtR -jumbo is insecure when faced with untrusted
> input now, and it is unclear if we'll ever fix that, although it'd be
> nice to do so. We might instead document the risk - in fact, we should
> do that for next -jumbo.)
>
> alloca() may bring the stack pointer outside of the stack area, and into
> some other area such as the heap.
>
>> There are also some uses of variable-size arrays,
>
> These are just as bad for security and reliability, and are even less
> portable.
>
>> which boils down to the same thing. These are harder to just grep out but I can easily list them trying to do OMP with Apple's gcc :)
>>
>> How do we get rid of them? Using stack arrays of maximum size that will ever be needed?
>
> We'll need to review and revise the code on a case by case basis.
> When there's a clear maximum size and it's small enough, we can use
> fixed-size arrays on the stack (and do proper bounds checking).
> In other cases, we can allocate dynamic memory and MEM_FREE() it before
> the function returns.
>
> I suspect that there are also cases where the allocation can be avoided
> altogether without complicating the code much (or even simplifying it).
Dhiru, I have a patch for this so don't bother with it (most of them were your formats). I just need to test it more. For all cases except GPG, fixed size arrays are fine. For GPG, malloc/free does not hurt performance at all.
BTW now that I can build OMP with llvm I can confirm the krb5-23 problem is still there.
magnum
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