[Libguestfs] [PATCH 2/2] daemon: Always reflect command stderr to stderr when debugging.

[Richard W.M. Jones]

On Mon, Nov 09, 2009 at 11:35:55AM +0100, Jim Meyering wrote:
> Richard W.M. Jones wrote:
> > +	if (stderror) {
> > +	  se_size += r;
> > +	  p = realloc (*stderror, se_size);
> > +	  if (p == NULL) {
> > +	    perror ("realloc");
> > +	    goto quit;
> > +	  }
> > +	  *stderror = p;
> > +	  memcpy (*stderror + se_size - r, buf, r);
> 
> Hi Rich,
> 
> This change looks fine.
> 
> However, there's an unrelated problem:
> if stderr is very large, incrementing se_size by "r"
> could result in a smaller total size (overflow).
> Then, the following memcpy would clobber the heap
> by writing a potentially very large amount of data
> into a much smaller (or even 0-length) buffer.
> 
> One way to avoid it:
> 
> 	size_t new_size = se_size + r;
> 	if (new_size < se_size) {
> 		perror ("standard error too large");
> 		goto quit;
> 	}
>         se_size = new_size;
> 
> Or perhaps better: limit the buffer size to say 1MiB,
> and warn if truncation is required.

If I'm understand this correctly, se_size would have to be O(2GB) for
this to be a problem?  I guess we'd have run out of memory long before
this because we only give the appliance ~500MB of memory, of which
much less than that is usable.

Or am I not understanding this right?

In any case it won't hurt to add a check here.

Rich.

-- 
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