Re: critique of gnulib - malloc wrapper

[Bruno Haible]

Jonas Termansen wrote:
> I object to the attitude that code analysis tools should only really be
> supported on glibc systems. A lot of security features are being
> pioneered on other systems and making it easier for everyone to use
> these tools benefits everyone
> 
> "Exploit mitigation counter-measures" is whenever a system has an
> exploit mitigation and software goes out of its way to not take benefit.
> A good example is the 2014 Heartbleed vulnerability where there was a
> good old buffer overflow. OpenSSL was wrapping malloc with its own
> allocation layer, which made use-after-free bugs worse and did not
> support zeroing freed allocations. That meant that systems with a
> hardened malloc (an exploit mitigation) such as OpenBSD, which would
> have reduced the data leakage a lot, did not benefit from the exploit
> mitigation. ...

The gnulib malloc wrapper is not an as severe problem as you might think.
It is only enabled
  - on AIX, because malloc(0) -> NULL on this platform,
  - on native Windows, because malloc does not errno upon failure,
  - in cross-compiles - a problem for which we are searching a solution.

When you say "A lot of security features are being pioneered on other systems",
these are mostly BSD and research OSes, not AIX nor native Windows.

Bruno