Re: [PATCH] kdb: prefer strlcpy to strncpy

[Daniel Thompson]

On Wed, May 30, 2018 at 10:47:13PM +0200, Geert Uytterhoeven wrote:
> H Daniel,
> 
> On Wed, May 30, 2018 at 4:34 PM, Daniel Thompson
> <daniel.thompson@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> > On Tue, May 29, 2018 at 07:01:35PM -0700, Nick Desaulniers wrote:
> >> On Tue, May 29, 2018 at 12:57 AM, Arnd Bergmann <arnd@xxxxxxxx> wrote:
> >> > On Tue, May 29, 2018 at 7:57 AM, Nick Desaulniers
> >> > <nick.desaulniers@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> >> >> Fixes stringop-truncation and stringop-overflow warnings from gcc-8.
> 
> >> Eric points out that this will leak kernel memory if size is less than
> >> sizeof src.
> >
> > Don't quite understand what this means (there's no allocation here, how
> > can there be a leak?) but the symbol completion certainly won't work if
> > we truncate the copy here.
> 
> Not leak an is memory leak, but leak as in information leak of uninitialized
> data to userspace (if the buffer is ever copied to userspace).

I see... I saw "leak", I saw "memory" and was perhaps too quick to link
the two together.

The underlying bug is a buffer overflow (so a good catch and I look
forward to a v2) but, with or without Nick's change, I can't see a leak
in either sense of the word in the code that Arnd was commenting on[1].


Daniel.


[1] Clearly the undefined behaviour post-overflow *could* be a leak but
    I stopped analyzing after the overflow.