undefined | Better HN

0 pointsdeathanatos2y ago0 comments

Do you mean that as written? I'd find that extremely surprising, and would in my mind, violate all sorts of safety assumptions, primarily that deref'ing NULL traps¹.

E.g., I am pretty sure Go relies on some of the behavior described here: that the 0 page is unmapped, and that accesses will trap. This is why Go code will sometimes SIGSEGV despite being an almost memory-safe language: Go is explicitly depending on that trap (and it permits Go, in those cases, to elide a validity check). (Vs. some memory accesses will incur a bounds check & panic, if Go cannot determine that they will definitely land in the first page; Go there must emit the validity check, and failing it is a panic, instead of a SIGSEGV.)

IIRC, Linux doesn't permit at least unprivileged processes to map address 0, I believe. (Although I can't find a source right now for that.)

¹Yes, in most languages this is UB … but what I'm saying is that having it trap makes errors — usually security errors — obvious & fail, instead of really letting the UB just do whatever and really going off into "it's really undefined now" territory.

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vlovich1232y ago

Ideally it would be an unmapped trap considering it’s literally how every other runtime works. The next best option is to make it read only. The dumbest option is to make it read/write as that’s going to be a vector for security vulnerabilities.

deathanatosOP2y ago

Security researchers are crafty. I wouldn't give them a read-only page, either. They'll find a way to turn a null-deref with that into an exploit.

"And then we just look for the UID under this NULL pointer — and hey, that's a read-only page of zeros! We're now root." Or something.

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