SEI CERT C Coding Standard

Space shortcuts

Page tree

Versions Compared

Old Version 87

changes.mady.by.user Carol J. Lallier

Saved on

compared with

New Version 88

changes.mady.by.user Pranjal Jumde

Saved on

Key

  • This line was added.
  • This line was removed.
  • Formatting was changed.

As noted in undefined behavior 179 of Annex J of the C standard [ISO/IEC 9899:2011], the behavior of a program is undefined when

the pointer argument to the free or realloc function does not match a pointer earlier returned by a memory management function, or the space has been deallocated by a call to free or realloc.

Freeing memory that is not allocated dynamically can lead to serious errors similar to those discussed in MEM31-C. Free dynamically allocated memory exactly once. The specific consequences of this error depend on the implementation, but they range from nothing to abnormal program termination. Regardless of the implementation, avoid calling free() on anything other than a pointer returned by a dynamic-memory allocation function, such as malloc(), calloc(), realloc(), or aligned_alloc.

...

Tool

Version

Checker

Description

LDRA tool suite

Include Page
LDRA_V
LDRA_V

483 S

Fully implemented.

Coverity Prevent

Include Page
Coverity_V
Coverity_V

BAD_FREE

Identifies calls to free() where the argument is a pointer to a function or an array. It also detects the cases where Free is used on an address-of expression, which can never be heap allocated. Coverity Prevent cannot discover all violations of this rule, so further verification is necessary.

Klocwork

Include Page
Klocwork_V
Klocwork_V

FNH.MIGHT
FNH.MUST
FUM.GEN.MIGHT
FUM.GEN.MUST

 

Compass/ROSE

  

Can detect some violations of this rule.

...

MITRE CWE: CWE-590, "Free of invalid pointer not on the heap"

Bibliography

[Seacord 2005] Chapter 4, "Dynamic Memory Management"

...