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Date: Mon, 6 Jul 2015 19:17:03 +0100
From: John Haxby <john.haxby@...cle.com>
To: oss-security@...ts.openwall.com
Subject: Re: How serious is undefined behavior?
> On 6 Jul 2015, at 17:17, Hanno Böck <hanno@...eck.de> wrote:
>
> However I wonder how practically relevant these issues are and also
> how much focus should be given to them. Do people have good examples
> where e.g. an invalid shift operation caused a real, severe security
> issue?
> Would people think it's a wise idea to put a lot of effort into testing
> applications with ubsan enabled and reporting all the bugs that pop up?
> (that would mean a lot of bugreports) Or would this be perceived as an
> annoying "that's a theoretical C language nitpick issue and not a real
> bug".
I don't have the example any more, but some years ago(*) we did have a problem because undefined behaviour on one compiler showed up differently on another. In our case it was a hard to track down bug because it wasn't particularly obvious that it was undefined. We were similarly bitten when a new compiler changed the implementation of something else undefined.
And of course, the classic foo(a++, bar(a++)) crops up in one form or another on a regular basis, It may have been that that changed from one release to another: one compiler evaluated all the arguments right to left, another one evaluated the first few left to right (to go into registers) and the later ones right to left. I forget, sorry.
Of course, most of the time these just result in peculiar bugs rather than exploitable security issues, but it's not too hard to come up with plausible cases that would lead to a failing security check.
jch
(*) OpenMail, if anyone wonders or cares.
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