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zeroize: possible UB in `Zeroize` implementation for `Option<T>`

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#653 3 comments 2 reactions 0 assignees View on GitHub

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Assessment

Difficulty
4/5
Estimated time
3-5 days
Newbie friendliness
35/100
Issue type
Bug
Clarity
Mostly clear
Activity status
Stale
Tech stack
rust
Domain
security

Research direction

Start with zeroize/src/lib.rs around line 330 and reproduce the reported behavior using the linked Rust Playground or Miri example. Determine a sound approach for the Option implementation and verify that the resulting behavior no longer triggers the reported undefined-behavior error.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Description

Originally filed by @jessa0 as https://github.com/iqlusioninc/crates/issues/782:

It seems the Zeroize implementation for Option<T> where T: Zeroize has language-level UB here:

https://github.com/RustCrypto/utils/blob/00b569b52b6dece2a8ae881f8e5a150a45ccc674/zeroize/src/lib.rs#L330

I believe, as a repr(Rust) enum, the memory layout and set of valid bit-patterns for Option is not defined, and that setting an enum's storage to an invalid bit-pattern while a reference to it exists, even if the value is never read, is instant language-level UB. The documentation for Option does mention guarantees for several special cases, but the None case still isn't defined for many of those cases, and the Zeroize implementation is more generic than that. Here's an example of a miri error in such a situation, that scottmcm came up with on URLO here.

Dominant language
Rust
Stars
674
Forks
170
Avg merge
1d 12h
Merged PRs (30d)
10

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