Page History

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Risk Assessment

Failure to properly null terminate null-terminated byte strings can result in buffer overflows and the execution of arbitrary code with the permissions of the vulnerable process by an attacker.

Related Vulnerabilities

Search for vulnerabilities resulting from the violation of this rule on the CERT website.

Mitigation Strategies

Static Analysis

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An inspection would essentially grep for known problem functions and inspect the usage. Obviously, this is extremely costly, as there would be a lot of false positives, and this does not scale well. There may also be many false negatives. Say Dev A inspects a function that returns an open string. Dev A considers it ok and documents it as such, perhaps this is one of the exception cases. Dev B might be inspecting another part of the code and might not realize that Dev A allowed an open string. It might be documented, but this is not very reliable. This might lead to a false sense of confidence that since the developers hand inspected every case that the code is fine, when in fact, a miscommunication can cause a defect.

Risk Assessment

Failure to properly null terminate null-terminated byte strings can result in buffer overflows and the execution of arbitrary code with the permissions of the vulnerable process by an attacker.

Related Vulnerabilities

Search for vulnerabilities resulting from the violation of this rule on the CERT website.

References

\[[ISO/IEC 9899-1999:TC2|AA. C References#ISO/IEC 9899-1999TC2]\] Section 7.1.1, "Definitions of terms," and Section 7.21, "String handling <string.h>"
\[[ISO/IEC TR 24731-2006|AA. C References#ISO/IEC TR 24731-2006]\] Section 6.7.1.4, "The strncpy_s function"
\[[Schwarz 05|AA. C References#Schwarz 05]\]
\[[Seacord 05|AA. C References#Seacord 05]\] Chapter 2, "Strings"
\[[Viega 05|AA. C References#Viega 05]\] Section 5.2.14, "Miscalculated null termination"