3 ms·

> think long about the question whether 64 bits always is enough for storing a string length, etc.), etc. I'm struggling to think of any realistic scenario wh

• Someone 10y ago
  So do I, but you should still consciously decide whether to add an overflow check. Let's do a quick estimate: one can read in the order of 2^24 bytes/second from disk. A day has on the order of 2^16 seconds, so that's 2^40 bytes/day. => You will need 2^24 days to read 2^64 bytes. I think that's around 50k years. That an attacker will try to generate a buffer overflow this way is a risk I would take, even if I thought the hardware had room to store that string. The only way I can foresee a real risk is when an optimizer can optimize away the computation of a string whose length it is asked to compute by an attacker. That's still very much far-fetched, and if no string gets allocated it's hard to see how it could become a security issue, but it could be a reason to be extra careful, for example when providing online access to a C++ compiler, with its template metaprogramming capabilities.