[cfe-dev] [EXTERNAL] Re: making -ftrivial-auto-var-init=zero a first-class option

[Joe Bialek via cfe-dev]

How are you going to efficiently check that something wasn't initialized at runtime? In a way that results in better codegen than just doing pattern initialization? I'm happy to see a solution but I don't see how this can be done in a way that doesn't involve metadata and checks. If you could do this at compile-time, you'd just issue a warning rather than let the issue hang around for someone to discover at runtime.

Also not clear to me what the OS is expected to do with this trap. We have a number of information leak vulnerabilities where force initialization kills the bug silently. If you have a non-recoverable trap you are now turning these bugs in to kernel crashes which is sort of a crappy user experience compared to just silently fixing the bug and allowing the OS to work as normal. As it is right now, we can just ignore the issues because they have no security or reliability impact which is great because it saves us time and money not having to service things, and customers don't have to install a code update either.

Joe
________________________________
From: Kees Cook <keescook at chromium.org>
Sent: Wednesday, April 22, 2020 10:40 AM
To: Richard Smith <richard at metafoo.co.uk>
Cc: Arthur O'Dwyer <arthur.j.odwyer at gmail.com>; Joe Bialek <jobialek at microsoft.com>; Clang Dev <cfe-dev at lists.llvm.org>
Subject: [EXTERNAL] Re: [cfe-dev] making -ftrivial-auto-var-init=zero a first-class option

On Tue, Apr 21, 2020 at 04:54:25PM -0700, Richard Smith wrote:
> The existence of the
> --long-ugly-flag-name-that-says-we'll-remove-the-feature is the way we
> currently try to avoid introducing a language dialect. If we remove that
> flag as is proposed, then we are effectively relitigating the question of
> whether to have the feature at all.

What about renaming the enable flag so it doesn't imply that zero-init
is going to be removed?

> And indeed it might even be OK if the initial behavior is that we *always*
> zero-initialize (as Philip asked), so long as our documentation clearly
> says that we do not guarantee that the value will be zero (only that we
> guarantee that *if the program continues*, the value will be zero), and our
> intent is that we may still produce traps or otherwise abort the
> computation.

Right -- I would see adding a trap path as a nice improvement. I still
think it'll be be too much overhead, though, given needing to check all
corners of a struct: accessing any padding bytes would need to trap,
etc.

--
Kees Cook
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