This is the mail archive of the
libc-alpha@sourceware.org
mailing list for the glibc project.
Re: [PATCH 0/3] explicit_bzero v5
On 11/15/2016 02:35 PM, Paul Eggert wrote:
> On 11/15/2016 10:42 AM, Florian Weimer wrote:
>> I'm concerned that developers will read all these warnings and use
>> memset instead (or a hand-written loop) because this appears to avoid
>> all these issues.
>
> Conversely if we omit the warnings, developers could easily be misled
> into thinking that explicit_bzero keeps secrets reliably, and we
> wouldn't want to mislead them. Perhaps we could add something like this,
> after all the Warnings: paragraphs:
>
> The above warnings do not imply that using @code{memset} or a
> hand-written loop are ``safer'' than using @code{explicit_bzero}, as
> these other techniques can run afoul of even more problems than
> @code{explicit_bzero} does.
That's not a terrible idea. I'm still concerned that the warnings
constitute a wall of scary text that will put people off reading,
though. I will think about this some more and send revised text later
today or tomorrow morning.
zw