Re: lynx-dev Some more security issues in Lynx...

[Bela Lubkin]

Tom Dickey wrote:

> > What is snprintf? 
> It is an 'sprintf' that allows you to specify a buffer limit.  There's
> a couple of flavors that it comes in (and they're incompatible).  I guess
> it's available on roughly half of the compilers people are using now.

I would guess more like 80%.

> (I don't believe it's either ANSI or POSIX - but it is present in Solaris).

I could be mistaken, but I think snprintf() has made it into the latest
Unix standards (the Open Group's Unix98, and presumably the underlying
XPG4.2 standard).

> For our purposes, it's not useful - I don't want to truncate strings
> just to avoid buffer overflow.

That's true in some cases; there are others where snprintf() would
certainly be useful.  But in any case, it can be programmed around.

Fixing these things one by one as they get slowly pointed out by bugtraq
isn't ever going to fix the real problem.  The entire Lynx code base
needs to be gone over with appropriate tools (software or human mind)
and fixed.  Then, when it's clean, we have to keep an eye on keeping it
that way.

I consider this all medium-distant-future stuff.  The code base is too
large for any one person to fully evaluate "in his spare time"...

>Bela<