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Re: US-CERT Vulnerability Note VU#162289
- From: David Edelsohn <dje at watson dot ibm dot com>
- To: "Robert C. Seacord" <rcs at cert dot org>
- Cc: mark at codesourcery dot com, gcc at gcc dot gnu dot org, Chad Dougherty <crd at cert dot org>
- Date: Mon, 07 Apr 2008 14:12:45 -0400
- Subject: Re: US-CERT Vulnerability Note VU#162289
- References: <47FA59B5.5000606@cert.org>
>>>>> Robert C Seacord writes:
Robert> I believe the vulnerability is that gcc may *silently*
Robert> discard the overflow checks and that this is a recent change in behavior.
Robert> You are also right that the popularity of gcc is one of the reasons we
Robert> decided to publish on this. If you identify other compilers that a) are
Robert> relatively popular, b) have changed their behavior recently, and c)
Robert> silently optimize out overflow checks we will consider publishing
Robert> vulnerability notes for those compilers as well.
All optimizing compilers silently should remove the check in the
process of optimizating the example code. Compilers generally do not warn
by default when processing code in a way that conforms to a language
standard.
I believe that GCC developers are disappointed that CERT has
chosen to single out GCC using the above set of criteria while most other
compilers perform the same transformation. If CERT wants to warn about
poorly-written code, it should focus on that vulnerability.
David