-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 On the cygwin list, it was pointed out that printf("%**s",1,"a","b") proceeds to try to print "b" with a field width of whatever the integer value of the pointer to "a" contained (or, in other words, each additional * consumes another vararg position off the stack). This quickly becomes a denial of service or even an exploitable security hole. Solaris 10 has the same behavior.
On the same input, glibc prints "%1*s" and returns 4, rather than failing with EINVAL. POSIX says results are unspecified if the format string is not valid. Is detection of invalid format strings something that we want the gnulib replacement *printf routines to handle, and if so, what semantics should we provide in rejecting the bad string? - -- Don't work too hard, make some time for fun as well! Eric Blake e...@byu.net -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.9 (Cygwin) Comment: Public key at home.comcast.net/~ericblake/eblake.gpg Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org/ iEYEARECAAYFAksMvYIACgkQ84KuGfSFAYCPBgCeLIDlKgXmIOhNjoozEXSA39Wk x70AoIwKWmnakkceGYnu6VIVsBGKX5zv =ytQC -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----