Re: Should memchr work with invalid data size?

[Carlos O'Donell <carlos at redhat dot com>]

On 05/17/2017 06:24 PM, H.J. Lu wrote:
> "main memchr" says
> 
> The  memchr()  function  scans  the  initial n bytes of the memory area
> pointed to by s for the first instance of c.
> 
> But test-memchr.c has
> 
>       if (pos < len)
>         {
>           size_t r = random ();
>           if ((r & 31) == 0)
>             len = ~(uintptr_t) (p + align) - ((r >> 5) & 31);
>           result = (CHAR *) (p + pos + align);
>         }
> 
> which sets len to some random value, like 18446603336355475958.
> Should memchr work with it?

A caller should expect the implementation may read any memory
location from "(char *)s" to "(char *)s + n - 1".

Therefore the above _might_ work depending on the implementation.

Could you please add lots of comments to do_random_tests() and
explain what it's doing and why?

It might have been a valid white-box test to try use a large value
of size_t randomly for an implementation that scans from the front
to back. You would do this kind of testing when looking for overflows.

I would expect an AFL fuzzer might do something similar unless you
constrain it.

-- 
Cheers,
Carlos.