Re: [PATCH bpf v5 1/2] lib/strncpy_from_user.c: Don't overcopy bytes after NUL terminator

[Linus Torvalds]

On Fri, Nov 13, 2020 at 11:17 AM Alexei Starovoitov
<alexei.starovoitov@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> The destination buffer was already initialized with zeros before the call.

Side note: this is another example of you using the interface incorrectly.

You should *not* initialize the buffer with zeroes. That's just extra
work. One of the points of the strncpy_from_user() interface is that
it is *not* the incredibly broken garbage that "strncpy()" is.

strncpy_from_user() returns the size of the resulting string,
*EXACTLY* so that people who care can then use that information
directly and efficiently.

Most of the time it's to avoid a strlen() on the result (and check for
overflow), of course, but the other use-case is exactly that "maybe I
need to pad out the result", so that you don't need to initialize the
buffer beforehand.

I'm not sure exactly which strncpy_from_user() user you have issues
with, but I did a

     git grep strncpy_from_user -- '*bpf*'

and several of them look quite questionable.

All of the ones in kernel/bpf/syscall.c seem to handle overflow
incorrectly, for example, with a silent truncation instead of error.
Maybe that's fine,  but it's questionable.

And the bpf_trace_copy_string() thing doesn't check the result at all,
so the end result may not be NUL-terminated. Maybe that's ok. I didn't
check the call chain.

              Linus