Ralf S. Engelschall wrote:
> Hmmmm??? Do you mean it cannot occur in practice? Or do I misunderstand you
> here. As I said: We not even need an attacker: When an I/O read error occurs
> for gcache it already falls down. So the DoS attacker is just the worst case.
Aha. Now we get down to it. OK, please describe how an I/O error can
occur on a locally connected socket.
> > BTW, I'm not claiming that I can defend every piece of code I've ever
> > written. If I've got it wrong, I'm keen to hear about it, especially if
> > accompanied by patches. Where I draw the line is with statements like
> > "assertions are inherently bad".
>
> I didn't say this. I said you're right that assertions are not bad in general.
> But any I/O or input related assertions are bad IMHO. And the patch is
> available, of course: diff gcache.c ssl_gcache.c, diff gcacheclient.c
> ssl_gcacheclient.c, diff gcachecommon.c ssl_gcachecommon.c.
This is far to general a criterion. Some kinds of I/O are completely
deterministic (given correct code). I agree that to assert on user input
is not a brilliant idea, but on a tightly linked client/server pair, it
seems to me no different to asserting on the value of a parameter.
> > I'll also admit that my coding style is more biased towards defending
> > against programmer error than attackers, but it is programmer errors
> > that attackers exploit, of course.
>
> As I said: As long as the assertions are not I/O or input related they are ok.
> But they are very problematic for a production system when they depend on
> input coming from external sources.
And the external source in this case is?
Cheers,
Ben.
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