strlen_user and keys

[Andries.Brouwer]

[faraway from home, not near recent kernel source]

strnlen_user() is documented as returning the string length including
terminating NUL. Probably that was a bad idea - people expect that
if user space and kernel library functions have similar names, they do
similar things. The shouting "INCLUDING" in the description already
shows that also the author expected that bugs would be created by
using this name.

[see, e.g., arch/i386/lib/usercopy.c]

security/keys/keyctl.c does

        dlen = strnlen_user(_description, PAGE_SIZE - 1);
	description = kmalloc(dlen + 1, GFP_KERNEL);
	copy_from_user(description, _description, dlen + 1);

copying one byte too many.
(Thus in some unknown kernel source tree, maybe 2.6.14.
This may have been fixed already.)

Andries
-
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
More majordomo info at  http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
Please read the FAQ at  http://www.tux.org/lkml/