Losing the magic [LWN.net]

Losing the magic

Posted Dec 14, 2022 17:10 UTC (Wed) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389)
In reply to: Losing the magic by adobriyan
Parent article: Losing the magic

It means that the value being represented is not trackable in the C abstract machine and therefore no assumptions can be made about it. Because no assumptions can be made, optimizers are hard-pressed to do much of anything about it because the "as-if" rule is likely impossible to track accurately.

However, given that this is trivially detectable as about-to-be-freed memory, I don't know what kind of rules exist around "volatile values living in C-maintained memory" might allow even this to still be seen as a dead store and unobservable via UAF == UB.

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Losing the magic

Posted Dec 14, 2022 19:31 UTC (Wed) by farnz (subscriber, #17727) [Link] (2 responses)

If I'm reading the standard correctly, the compiler has to output the stores, because it is possible that the program has shared that memory with an external entity using mechanisms outside the scope of the standard. What the implementation does after the memory is freed is not specified (although the implementation is allowed to assume that the memory is no longer shared with an external entity at this point), and in theory a sufficiently malicious implementation could undo those final stores after you called free, but before the memory is reused.

In practice, I don't think this is a significant concern for tricks intended to help with debugging. It is for security-oriented code, but that's not the case here.

Losing the magic

Posted Dec 14, 2022 23:25 UTC (Wed) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link] (1 responses)

Can the C abstract machine really say that memory it obtains through `malloc` has some other magical property? Wouldn't that require you to get "lucky" with what `malloc` gives you in the first place to have that address space "mean something" to some other part of the system?

Maybe the kernel gets away with it by "hiding" behind non-standard allocation APIs…

Losing the magic

Posted Dec 15, 2022 10:47 UTC (Thu) by farnz (subscriber, #17727) [Link]

It's more that you can have an external observer outside the abstract machine, but able to understand abstract machine pointers; I can, in theory, store a pointer from malloc in a way that allows the external observer to reach into the abstract machine and read the malloc'd block. I can also have the external observer be looking not at the addresses, but at the pattern of data written into the block (just as in hardware, it's not unknown to have chips only connected to the address bus, and to rely on the pattern of address accesses to determine what to do).

The compiler is not allowed to make assumptions about what the external environment can, or cannot, see, and thus has to assume that any write to a volatile is visible in an interesting fashion.