[cfe-dev] Static Analyzer Rocks Hard

Ted Kremenek kremenek at apple.com
Mon Jun 23 10:15:04 PDT 2008


On Jun 23, 2008, at 9:05 AM, Török Edwin wrote:

> Not handling allocation failures can lead to security holes if the
> parameter to malloc
> can be somehow controlled by an attacker.

I'm inclined to believe that this is a slightly orthogonal issue,  
although your point is well-taken. The security bug comes from using  
an untrusted value as the size argument to malloc.  While checking for  
malloc failure might indirectly handle some of these issues, it  
doesn't really address the original security problem, as the untrusted  
data could be used to wreck havoc in other ways.

The more complete way to catch these bugs (and potentially verify  
their absence) is to flag dangerous uses of untrusted data: using it  
as a size parameter to malloc, using it as an array index, and so on.

My point here is that not checking for malloc failure is not  
inherently a security bug.

> However in practice most allocations are unchecked leading to huge
> number of warnings, so I think it would be best
> to have an option to toggle checking for malloc failures.
> Or classify them differently so you can filter the errors from the  
> HTML
> report:
>    null dereference on allocation failure, uninitialized value on
> allocation failure, ...

I agree.  I think it all depends on the particular goals of the  
programmer for the application they are writing.

The reality is that most code doesn't check to see if allocation  
fails.  In such cases, I don't believe that programmers are interested  
in seeing warnings from a tool that involve allocation failure.  When  
some warnings systematically become noise to the user, they really do  
compromise the value of the bug-finding tool.

For those who want to be particularly vigilant about their code (at  
least as far as memory allocation failure is concerned), there  
certainly should be an option to either have the analyzer perform more  
aggressive checking (i.e., assume malloc can fail) or have the  
interface for inspecting bugs allow users to filter which bug reports  
they see based on whether or not the bug assumes malloc fails, etc.



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