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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   32892 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 5, 2024

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.Arrays do (in compile-time, so if you have the type sizeof will return the actual size), it's just that they decay to pointers if you do anything with them like pass it to a function.

I but a humble C++ programmer who hasn't used arrays except in a Class for so long that I forget that it only decay's to a ptr in certain cases.

Accessing data outside of an array is undefined behaviour and often won't crash if it's just 1 access outside of the end, it'll just fetch garbage instead. You'd have to build the program with an "undefined behavior sanitizer" that detects stuff like that, but I don't know if that's compatible with running in the windows kernel.

The UB would have resulted in NULLPTR except every time though I figured. Yes an UB sanitizer is probably unworkable in a kernel program I don't write kernel code.

Yes an UB sanitizer is probably unworkable in a kernel program

A kernel program is not that different from any other.

i think the problem would be the kernel would need to support the memory sanitizer. as long as your kernel module only touched memory allocated from its own functions then i guess in theory you could run a memory sanitizer without kernel support but your kernel module would be pretty useless. the problem is if the kernel gives you a buffer then how does the memory sanitizer that has no knowledge of the kernel know that the buffer is safe to read or write from. apparently windows does have support for kasan so vendor support should make it workable (https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/security/blog/2023/01/26/introducing-kernel-sanitizers-on-microsoft-platforms/). though, i don't use windows so i don't know how well it works. also, i guess you could just have a userspace test harness but for something like this you probably need some kind of final test with the module running in the kernel.

In this case it is, with completely different rules about stdlib usage, memory allocation, what can and cannot be paged etc.

I but a humble C++ programmer who hasn't used arrays except in a Class for so long that I forget that it only decay's to a ptr in certain cases.

To be fair, this is a wart in C's design. Nobody serious (in particular nobody that does kernel level programming) uses array arguments because decay is inconsistent. The last time I saw the topic discussed it was in the context of Linus bollocking someone over it.

having the out of bound entry as zeroes in testing and garbage in real life is also a way it can pass in the test but fail when deployed. imagine it is a struct and the function accessing it checks if one value is true and then just stops processing if the value is false. it wouldn't crash in testing but once deployed depending on the check it could have a very high probability of crashing. usually boolean check would decay into some kind of comparison to 0 so if the value is stored in 8 bits or even 32 bits then its very likely to be not 0.

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