3 ms·
A bug is a bug even when it doesn't clearly manifest itself 100% of the time, and furthermore it is pretty much guaranteed that NULL dereference crashes with se
by jstimpfle 4mo ago
A bug is a bug even when it doesn't clearly manifest itself 100% of the time, and furthermore it is pretty much guaranteed that NULL dereference crashes with segfault in practice, only not for the people playing theoretic games whose essence of life is finding gotchas where it maybe isn't so and then feeling smarter than everyone else.
But it's >> 99.9% true that this will just crash even though it's acshually UB, nasal demons and so forth. Now raise this << 0.1% likelihood that it isn't true on some system with some compiler and build flags, to the power of the number of distinct deployed configurations out there, and you get the result which is the correct engineering decision of just moving on instead of spending your life filling straightforward code with pointless boilerplate assertions.
NB it can make sense to assert nonnull when the condition won't be tested on all code paths or the intention is otherwise not super obvious.
- Dylan16807 4mo agoI don't want to nitpick people often but your use of division sign to mean percent is really throwing me off.
- jstimpfle 4mo agoThanks for letting me know, nitpick appreciated. Typing on my phone.
- lmm 4mo ago> it's >> 99.9% true that this will just crash even though it's acshually UB, nasal demons and so forth. Is it though? Linux saw enough bugs from that kind of issue that they now build with -fno-delete-null-pointer-checks and accept the (supposed) performance penalty.
- uecker 4mo agoThe kernel is perhaps bit special. In the past they had bugs such as first derferencing and then checking for null and weird possibilities to map the zero page. But today I am not convinced this is really needed. In general on a system where you trap when accessing the zero page, this optimization should be safe and a null pointer dereferences should (safely) trap.
- lmm 4mo ago> In general on a system where you trap when accessing the zero page, this optimization should be safe and a null pointer dereferences should (safely) trap. If you mean that C compiler writers "should" prioritise sanity over high scores on microbenchmarks, then I agree. However in practice they do not and this optimization is not remotely safe.
- uecker 4mo agoDo you have any evidence for this? On GCC it should be safe. (EDIT: what is not safe is indexing into a null pointer. For this you need to be safe you need -fsanitize=null)
- lmm 4mo agoI don't understand your comment - dereferencing a null pointer is unsafe, in the sense that it does not reliably crash but may do other things, as we saw in the kernel case we're talking about. Yes that particular case was only exploitable if you mapped the zero page, but given how all-bets-are-off a situation it created (where extremely experienced programmers thought they knew what the code did, thought it was safe, and were wrong), I would not want to count on all cases not being exploitable without mapping the zero page.
- jstimpfle 4mo agoMay. If. If. If. In case. We are talking about an extremely simple straightforward API with an obvious contract. It's good enough for this function to reliably surface almost all wrong uses with a segfault immediately. Wrong use will result in segfaults and otherwise bugs and crashes. The goal is not to work when used wrong but to work when used right. You cannot save the world from scratch in every little function. You still have a job to get done, and you have to move on.
- lmm 4mo ago> You cannot save the world from scratch in every little function. You still have a job to get done, and you have to move on. Or you can take all of 10 minutes to put sanity-check assertions at the start of all your public-facing API functions, eliminating a source of security bugs, get on with your life, and worry about the performance implications as and when it becomes a problem (hint: it's never going to become a problem).