SEI CERT C Coding Standard

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changes.mady.by.user Robert Seacord (Manager)

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Allocating 0 bytes can lead to abnormal program termination.

Recommendation

Severity

Likelihood

Remediation Cost

Priority

Level

MEM04-C

Low

Likely

Medium

P6

L2

Automated Detection

Tool

Version

Checker

Description

Astrée
Include Page
Astrée_V
Astrée_V

Supported, but no explicit checker
CodeSonar
Include Page
CodeSonar_V
CodeSonar_V
(customization)Users can add a custom check for allocator calls with size argument 0 (this includes literal 0, underconstrained tainted values, and computed values). 
Compass/ROSE
 

 



Can detect some violations of this rule. In particular, it warns when the argument to malloc() is a variable that has not been compared against 0 or that is known at compile time to be 0

Parasoft C/C++test

Include Page
Parasoft_V
Parasoft_V

CERT_C-MEM04-aThe validity of values passed to library functions shall be checked
Polyspace Bug Finder

Include Page
Polyspace Bug Finder_V
Polyspace Bug Finder_V

CERT C: Rec. MEM04-C


Checks for:

  • Variable length array with nonpositive size
  • Tainted sign change conversion
  • Tainted size of variable length array

Rec. fully covered.

Related Vulnerabilities

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

Related Guidelines

SEI CERT C++
Secure
Coding StandardVOID MEM04-CPP. Do not perform zero-length allocations
MITRE CWECWE-687, Function call with incorrectly specified argument value

 Bibliography

[ISO/IEC 9899:2011]Section 7.22.3, "Memory Management Functions"
[Seacord 2013]Chapter 4, "Dynamic Memory Management"
[Vanegue 2010]"Automated Vulnerability Analysis of Zero-Sized Heap Allocations"

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