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Re: alloca avoidance patches


On 19/06/17 18:36, Paul Eggert wrote:
> On 06/19/2017 09:47 AM, Joseph Myers wrote:
>> we need a clear definition of what stack frame size
>> glibc can assume is safe (so that we can aim to eliminate alloca and VLAs
>> unless the compiler can see they are bounded, and use -Wstack-usage= for
>> building glibc to make sure no function uses too much stack).
> 
> For what it's worth, Gnulib uses the magic number 4032. That is, arrays containing more than 4032 bytes are
> supposed to be allocated on the heap rather than on the stack via alloca. This number was chosen to work on all
> platforms Gnulib is intended to be portable to; we didn't bother to tailor the number to each platform. The
> basic assumptions in Gnulib are:
> 
> * Every stack is guarded by at least 4096 bytes' worth of inaccessible pages; the 4032 is because we subtract a
> few bytes for local variables.
> 
> * There is at most one such array per stack frame.
> 
> * The compiler does not coalesce stack frames for functions that declare large locals. This is a bit tricky, as
> a function that allocates a local buffer via 'char buffer[4000];' is not safe if it calls another function that
> allocates a similar local buffer, because the call could be inlined. In theory I suppose this could be a
> problem even with alloca, but in practice I don't recall seeing it happen with alloca.
> 

indeed it is not enough to check for large stack
allocations, you need to check for many small
allocations without intermediate stack access too.

in any case i think it's more productive to
fix the stack usage bugs, instead of hardening
for this class of exploitable stack usage bugs,
even if the guard page catches the issue it
is an unwanted crash.

> PS. My first reaction was to ask "how's -fstack-check going?" but I see Jeff Law beat me to it.
> 


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