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Potentially overrunning write

ID: cpp/overrunning-write
Kind: problem
Security severity: 9.3
Severity: error
Precision: medium
Tags:
   - reliability
   - security
   - external/cwe/cwe-120
   - external/cwe/cwe-787
   - external/cwe/cwe-805
Query suites:
   - cpp-security-extended.qls
   - cpp-security-and-quality.qls

Click to see the query in the CodeQL repository

The program performs a buffer copy or write operation with no upper limit on the size of the copy, and it appears that certain inputs will cause a buffer overflow to occur in this case. In addition to causing program instability, techniques exist which may allow an attacker to use this vulnerability to execute arbitrary code.

Recommendation

Always control the length of buffer copy and buffer write operations. strncpy should be used over strcpy, snprintf over sprintf, and in other cases ‘n-variant’ functions should be preferred.

Example

void sayHello(uint32_t userId)
{
	char buffer[18];

	// BAD: this message overflows the buffer if userId >= 10000
	sprintf(buffer, "Hello, user %d!", userId);

	MessageBox(hWnd, buffer, "New Message", MB_OK);
}

In this example, the call to sprintf writes a message of 14 characters (including the terminating null) plus the length of the string conversion of `userId` into a buffer with space for just 18 characters. As such, if `userId` is greater or equal to `10000`, the last characters overflow the buffer resulting in undefined behavior.

To fix this issue these changes should be made:

  • Control the size of the buffer by declaring it with a compile time constant.

  • Preferably, replace the call to sprintf with snprintf, using the defined constant size of the buffer or `sizeof(buffer)` as maximum length to write. This will prevent the buffer overflow.

  • Optionally, if `userId` is expected to be less than `10000`, then return or throw an error if `userId` is out of bounds.

  • Otherwise, consider increasing the buffer size to at least 25 characters, so that the message is displayed correctly regardless of the value of `userId`.

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