undefined behavior in do_fill_uninitialized_memory()

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#39 opened on Feb 4, 2021 1 comment 0 reactions 0 assignees View on GitHub

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Assessment

Difficulty: 2/5
Estimated time: 1-3 hours
Newbie friendliness: 52/100

Issue type: Bug
Clarity: Clearly specified
Activity status: Stale
Tech stack: cpp
Domain: backend

Research direction

Start in boost/circular_buffer/debug.h, at do_fill_uninitialized_memory(), and review the copy-construction path for an empty circular_buffer. Reproduce the example with GCC 9.1, -fsanitize=undefined, and -DBOOST_CB_ENABLE_DEBUG=1; done means the empty-copy case no longer reports the null-pointer error while nonzero fills remain checked.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Description

Using gcc 9.1 with -fsanitize=undefined and -DBOOST_CB_ENABLE_DEBUG=1, the following code results in a ubsan error: "boost/circular_buffer/debug.hpp:37:16: runtime error: null pointer passed as argument 1, which is declared to never be null".

using Q = boost::circular_buffer<int>;  
Q q;    
const Q q2(q);

The ubsan error is a result of the following code in circular_buffer/debug.h:

template <class T>
inline void do_fill_uninitialized_memory(T* data, std::size_t size_in_bytes) BOOST_NOEXCEPT {
    std::memset(static_cast<void*>(data), UNINITIALIZED, size_in_bytes);
}

During copy construction, the function gets called with data == nullptr and size_in_bytes == 0. I believe that passing a null pointer to memset is technically undefined behavior even if the size is 0.

Changing the above function as follows avoids the ubsan error:

template <class T>
inline void do_fill_uninitialized_memory(T* data, std::size_t size_in_bytes) BOOST_NOEXCEPT {
    if (size_in_bytes != 0u) {
        std::memset(static_cast<void*>(data), UNINITIALIZED, size_in_bytes);
    }
}

I had originally written it to check for data != nullptr, but since this is debug code I thought it seemed desirable to know if the function is ever called with data == null and size_in_bytes != 0. In any case, either way will prevent the ubsan error.

Dominant language: C++
Stars: 65
Forks: 64
PR merge metrics: No merged PRs in 30d

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