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The above statement is evaluated at runtime, allocating storage for {{s{}}} characters in stack memory. If a size argument supplied to VLAs is not a positive integer value of reasonable size, then the program may behave in an unexpected way. An attacker may be able to leverage this behavior to overwrite critical program data \[[Griffiths 06|http://felinemenace.org/papers/p63-0x0e_Shifting_the_Stack_Pointer.txt]\]. The programmer must ensure that size arguments to VLAs are valid and have not been corrupted as the result of an exceptional integer condition. |
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In this example, a VLA of size s is declared. In accordance with recommendation INT01-A. Use size_t for all integer values representing the size of an object, s is of type size_t, as it is used to specify the size of an object. However, it is unclear whether or not the value of s is a valid size argument. Depending on how VLAs are implemented, s may be interpreted as a negative value or a very large positive value. In either case, this may result in a security vulnerability.
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