Re: [PATCH] lib: Always NUL terminate ucs2_as_utf8

From: Peter Jones
Date: Thu Apr 21 2016 - 11:13:56 EST


On Thu, Apr 21, 2016 at 01:18:27PM +0100, Matt Fleming wrote:
> ( Good Lord, I hate doing string manipulation in C )

(yep)

>
> On Wed, 20 Apr, at 03:25:32PM, Laszlo Ersek wrote:
> >
> > So, "len" does not include the room for the terminating NUL-byte here.
> > When "len" is passed to ucs2_as_utf8(), with the proposed patch applied,
> > a NUL byte will be produced in "name", but it will be at the price of a
> > genuine character from the input variable name.
>
> Right, and this is a problem because we're trying to keep the names
> consistent between efivarfs and the EFI variable data. Force
> NUL-terminating the string is wrong, because if you have no room for
> the NUL the caller should check for that. Sadly none do.
>
> On the flip-side, passing around non-NUL terminated strings is just
> begging for these kinds of issues to come up.
>
> The fact is that the callers of ucs2_as_utf8() are passing it the
> wrong 'len' argument. We want a NUL-terminated utf8 string and we're
> passing a NUL-terminated ucs2 string. We should tell ucs2_as_utf8() it
> has enough room to copy the NUL.
>
> Wouldn't this work (minus the return value checking)?

I agree with your analysis, and your patch looks plausible.

--
Peter