20 May
2024
20 May
'24
7:06 p.m.
I'm surprised by nonchalance about bad inputs evoking bad program behavior.
That attitude may have been excusable 50 years ago. By now, though, we have
seen so much malicious exploitation of open avenues of "undefined behavior"
that we can no longer ignore bugs that "can't happen when using the tool
correctly". Mature software should not brook incorrect usage.
"Bailing out near line 1" is a sign of defensive precautions. Crashes and
unjustified output betray their absence.
I commend attention to the LangSec movement, which advocates for rigorously
enforced separation between legal and illegal inputs.
Doug
20 May
20 May
7:14 p.m.
Perhaps I should not respond to this immediately. But:
Douglas McIlroy <douglas.mcilroy(a)dartmouth.edu> wrote:
I'm surprised by nonchalance about bad inputs
evoking bad program behavior.
That attitude may have been excusable 50 years ago. By now, though, we have
seen so much malicious exploitation of open avenues of "undefined behavior"
that we can no longer ignore bugs that "can't happen when using the tool
correctly". Mature software should not brook incorrect usage.
It's not nonchalance, not at all!
The current behavior is to die on the first syntax error, instead of
trying to be "helpful" by continuing to try to parse the program in the
hope of reporting other errors.
"Bailing out near line 1" is a sign of
defensive precautions. Crashes and
unjustified output betray their absence.
The crashes came because errors cascaded. I don't see a reason to spend
valuable, *personal* time on adding defenses *where they aren't needed*.
A steel door on your bedroom closet does no good if your front door
is made of balsa wood. My change was to stop the badness at the
front door.
I commend attention to the LangSec movement, which
advocates for rigorously
enforced separation between legal and illegal inputs.
Illegal input, in gawk, as far as I know, should always cause a syntax
error report and an immediate exit.
If it doesn't, that is a bug, and I'll be happy to try to fix it.
I hope that clarifies things.
Arnold
8 p.m.
Hi folks,
At 2024-05-20T07:14:07-0600, arnold(a)skeeve.com wrote:
Douglas McIlroy <douglas.mcilroy(a)dartmouth.edu>
wrote:
[...]
I'm surprised by nonchalance about bad
inputs evoking bad program
behavior. That attitude may have been excusable 50 years ago. By
now, though, we have seen so much malicious exploitation of open
avenues of "undefined behavior" that we can no longer ignore bugs
that "can't happen when using the tool correctly". Mature software
should not brook incorrect usage.
It's not nonchalance, not at all!
The current behavior is to die on the first syntax error, instead of
trying to be "helpful" by continuing to try to parse the program in
the hope of reporting other errors. The crashes came because errors cascaded. I
don't see a reason to
spend valuable, *personal* time on adding defenses *where they aren't
needed*.
A steel door on your bedroom closet does no good if your front door is
made of balsa wood. My change was to stop the badness at the front
door.
For grins, and for a data point from elsewhere in GNU-land, GNU troff is
pretty robust to this sort of thing. Much as I might like to boast of
having improved it in this area, it appears to have already come with
iron long johns courtesy of James Clark and/or Werner Lemberg. I threw
troff its own ELF executable as a crude fuzz test some years ago, and I
don't recall needing to fix anything except unhelpfully vague diagnostic
messages (a phenomenon I am predisposed to observe anyway).
I did notice today that in one case we were spewing back out unprintable
characters (newlines, character codes > 127) _in_ one (but only one) of
the diagnostic messages, and while that's ugly, it's not an obvious
exploitation vector to me.
Nevertheless I decided to fix it and it will be in my next push.
So here's the mess you get when feeding GNU troff to itself. No GNU
troff since before 1.22.3 core dumps on this sort of unprepossessing
input.
$ ./build/test-groff -Ww -z /usr/bin/troff 2>&1 | sed 's/:[0-9]\+:/:/' |
sort | uniq -c
17 troff:/usr/bin/troff: error: a backspace character is not allowed in an escape
sequence parameter
10 troff:/usr/bin/troff: error: a space character is not allowed in an escape
sequence parameter
1 troff:/usr/bin/troff: error: a space is not allowed as a starting delimiter
1 troff:/usr/bin/troff: error: a special character is not allowed in an identifier
1 troff:/usr/bin/troff: error: character '-' is not allowed as a starting
delimiter
1 troff:/usr/bin/troff: error: invalid argument ')' to output suppression
escape sequence
1 troff:/usr/bin/troff: error: invalid argument 'c' to output suppression
escape sequence
1 troff:/usr/bin/troff: error: invalid argument 'l' to output suppression
escape sequence
1 troff:/usr/bin/troff: error: invalid argument 'm' to output suppression
escape sequence
1 troff:/usr/bin/troff: error: invalid positional argument number ','
3 troff:/usr/bin/troff: error: invalid positional argument number '<'
3 troff:/usr/bin/troff: error: invalid positional argument number 'D'
1 troff:/usr/bin/troff: error: invalid positional argument number 'E'
10 troff:/usr/bin/troff: error: invalid positional argument number 'H'
1 troff:/usr/bin/troff: error: invalid positional argument number 'Hi'
1 troff:/usr/bin/troff: error: invalid positional argument number 'I'
1 troff:/usr/bin/troff: error: invalid positional argument number 'I9'
1 troff:/usr/bin/troff: error: invalid positional argument number 'L'
1 troff:/usr/bin/troff: error: invalid positional argument number 'LD'
2 troff:/usr/bin/troff: error: invalid positional argument number 'LL'
5 troff:/usr/bin/troff: error: invalid positional argument number 'LT'
1 troff:/usr/bin/troff: error: invalid positional argument number 'M'
4 troff:/usr/bin/troff: error: invalid positional argument number 'P'
5 troff:/usr/bin/troff: error: invalid positional argument number 'X'
1 troff:/usr/bin/troff: error: invalid positional argument number 'dH'
1 troff:/usr/bin/troff: error: invalid positional argument number 'h'
1 troff:/usr/bin/troff: error: invalid positional argument number 'l'
1 troff:/usr/bin/troff: error: invalid positional argument number 'p'
1 troff:/usr/bin/troff: error: invalid positional argument number 'x'
3 troff:/usr/bin/troff: error: invalid positional argument number '|'
35 troff:/usr/bin/troff: error: invalid positional argument number (unprintable)
3 troff:/usr/bin/troff: error: unterminated transparent embedding escape sequence
The second to last (and most frequent) message in the list above is the
"new" one. Here's the diff.
diff --git a/src/roff/troff/input.cpp b/src/roff/troff/input.cpp
index 8d828a01e..596ecf6f9 100644
--- a/src/roff/troff/input.cpp
+++ b/src/roff/troff/input.cpp
@@ -4556,10 +4556,21 @@ static void interpolate_arg(symbol nm)
}
else {
const char *p;
- for (p = s; *p && csdigit(*p); p++)
- ;
- if (*p)
- copy_mode_error("invalid positional argument number '%1'", s);
+ bool is_valid = true;
+ bool is_printable = true;
+ for (p = s; *p != 0 /* nullptr */; p++) {
+ if (!csdigit(*p))
+ is_valid = false;
+ if (!csprint(*p))
+ is_printable = false;
+ }
+ if (!is_valid) {
+ const char msg[] = "invalid positional argument number";
+ if (is_printable)
+ copy_mode_error("%1 '%2'", msg, s);
+ else
+ copy_mode_error("%1 (unprintable)", msg);
+ }
else
input_stack::push(input_stack::get_arg(atoi(s)));
}
GNU troff may have started out with an easier task in this area than an
AWK or a shell had; its syntax is not block-structured in the same way,
so parser state recovery is easier, and it's _inherently_ a filter.
The only fruitful fuzz attack on groff I can recall was upon indexed
bibliographic database files, which are a binary format. This went
unresolved for several years[1] but I fixed it for groff 1.23.0.
https://bugs.debian.org/716109
Regards,
Branden
[1] I think I understand the low triage priority. Few groff users use
the refer(1) preprocessor, and of those who do, even fewer find
modern systems so poorly performant at text scanning that they
desire the services of indxbib(1) to speed lookup of bibliographic
entries.
I commend attention to the LangSec movement,
which advocates for
rigorously enforced separation between legal and illegal inputs.
Illegal input, in gawk, as far as I know, should always cause a syntax
error report and an immediate exit.
If it doesn't, that is a bug, and I'll be happy to try to fix it.
I hope that clarifies things. 
7:25 p.m.
On 5/20/24 9:06 AM, Douglas McIlroy wrote:
I'm surprised by nonchalance about bad inputs
evoking bad program behavior.
I think the claim is that it's better to stop immediately with an error
on invalid input rather than guess at the user's intent and try to go on.
--
``The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne.'' - Chaucer
``Ars longa, vita brevis'' - Hippocrates
Chet Ramey, UTech, CWRU chet(a)case.edu http://tiswww.cwru.edu/~chet/
7:41 p.m.
New subject: A fuzzy awk.
Hi Chet,
Doug wrote:
That aside, having made the decision to patch up the input so more
punched cards are consumed, the patch should be bug free.
Say it's inserting a semicolon token for pretence. It should have
initialised source-file locations just as if it were real. Not an
uninitialised pointer to a source filename so a later dereference
failed.
I can see an avalanche of errors in an earlier gawk caused problems, but
each time there would have been a first patch of the input which made
a mistake causing the pebble to start rolling. My understanding is that
there was potentially a lot of these and rather than fix them it was
more productive of the limited time to stop patching the input. Then
the code which patched could be deleted, getting rid of the buggy bits
along the way?
--
Cheers, Ralph.
I'm surprised by nonchalance about bad
inputs evoking bad program
behavior.
I think the claim is that it's better to stop immediately with an
error on invalid input rather than guess at the user's intent and try
to go on.
8:26 p.m.
New subject: A fuzzy awk.
On 5/20/24 9:41 AM, Ralph Corderoy wrote:
Hi Chet,
Maybe we're talking about the same thing. My impression is that at
each point there was more than one potential token to insert and go on,
and gawk chose one (probably the most common one), in the hopes that it
would be able to report as many errors as possible. There's always the
chance you'll be wrong there.
(I have no insight into the actual nature of these issues, or the actual
corruption that caused the crashes, so take the next with skepticism.)
And then rather than go back and modify other state after inserting
this token -- which gawk did not do -- for the sole purpose of making
this guessing more crash-resistant, Arnold chose a different approach:
exit on invalid input.
--
``The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne.'' - Chaucer
``Ars longa, vita brevis'' - Hippocrates
Chet Ramey, UTech, CWRU chet(a)case.edu http://tiswww.cwru.edu/~chet/
Doug wrote:
That aside, having made the decision to patch up the input so more
punched cards are consumed, the patch should be bug free.
Say it's inserting a semicolon token for pretence. It should have
initialised source-file locations just as if it were real. Not an
uninitialised pointer to a source filename so a later dereference
failed.
I can see an avalanche of errors in an earlier gawk caused problems, but
each time there would have been a first patch of the input which made
a mistake causing the pebble to start rolling. My understanding is that
there was potentially a lot of these and rather than fix them it was
more productive of the limited time to stop patching the input. Then
the code which patched could be deleted, getting rid of the buggy bits
along the way?
I'm surprised by nonchalance about bad
inputs evoking bad program
behavior.
I think the claim is that it's better to stop immediately with an
error on invalid input rather than guess at the user's intent and try
to go on.
22 May
22 May
7:44 p.m.
New subject: A fuzzy awk.
I've been travelling, so I haven't been able to answer
these mails until now.
Ralph Corderoy <ralph(a)inputplus.co.uk> wrote:
I can see an avalanche of errors in an earlier gawk
caused problems, but
each time there would have been a first patch of the input which made
a mistake causing the pebble to start rolling. My understanding is that
there was potentially a lot of these and rather than fix them it was
more productive of the limited time to stop patching the input. Then
the code which patched could be deleted, getting rid of the buggy bits
along the way?
That's not the case. Gawk didn't try to patch the input. It
simply set a flag saying "don't try to run" but kept on parsing
anyway, in the hope of finding more errors.
That was a bad idea, because the representation of the program
being built was then not in the correct state to have more
stuff parsed and converted into byte code.
Very early on, the first parse error caused an exit. I changed
it to keep going to try to be helpful. But when that became a source
for essentially specious bug reports and a time sink for me, it
became time to go back to exiting on the first problem.
HTH,
Arnold
20 May
20 May
7:54 p.m.
New subject: A fuzzy awk.
Hi,
Doug wrote:
I commend attention to the LangSec movement, which
advocates for
rigorously enforced separation between legal and illegal inputs.
https://langsec.org
‘The Language-theoretic approach (LangSec) regards the Internet
insecurity epidemic as a consequence of ‘ad hoc’ programming of
input handling at all layers of network stacks, and in other kinds
of software stacks. LangSec posits that the only path to
trustworthy software that takes untrusted inputs is treating all
valid or expected inputs as a formal language, and the respective
input-handling routines as a ‘recognizer’ for that language.
The recognition must be feasible, and the recognizer must match the
language in required computation power.
‘When input handling is done in ad hoc way, the ‘de facto’
recognizer, i.e. the input recognition and validation code ends up
scattered throughout the program, does not match the programmers'
assumptions about safety and validity of data, and thus provides
ample opportunities for exploitation. Moreover, for complex input
languages the problem of full recognition of valid or expected
inputs may be *undecidable*, in which case no amount of
input-checking code or testing will suffice to secure the program.
Many popular protocols and formats fell into this trap, the
empirical fact with which security practitioners are all too
familiar.
‘LangSec helps draw the boundary between protocols and API designs
that can and cannot be secured and implemented securely, and charts
a way to building truly trustworthy protocols and systems. A longer
summary of LangSec in this USENIX Security BoF hand-out, and in the
talks, articles, and papers below.’
That does look interesting; I'd not heard of it.
--
Cheers, Ralph.
9:39 p.m.
New subject: OT: LangSec (Re: A fuzzy awk.)
On 2024-05-20 15:54, Ralph Corderoy wrote:
Doug wrote:
. . .
I commend attention to the LangSec movement,
which advocates for
rigorously enforced separation between legal and illegal inputs.
https://langsec.org
‘The Language-theoretic approach (LangSec) regards the Internet
insecurity epidemic as a consequence of ‘ad hoc’ programming of
input handling at all layers of network stacks, and in other kinds
of software stacks. LangSec posits that the only path to
trustworthy software that takes untrusted inputs is treating all
valid or expected inputs as a formal language, and the respective
input-handling routines as a ‘recognizer’ for that language.
‘LangSec helps draw the boundary between protocols
and API designs
that can and cannot be secured and implemented securely, and charts
a way to building truly trustworthy protocols and systems. A longer
summary of LangSec in this USENIX Security BoF hand-out, and in the
talks, articles, and papers below.’
Yes, it's an interesting concept. Those *n?x tools that have
lex/yacc frontends are probably closer to this than the average
hack.
It may become hard to reconcile this with the robustness principle
(Be conservative in what you send, be liberal in what you accept)
that Jon Postel popularized. Maybe it becomes necessary, though.
--
Åke Nordin <ake.nordin(a)netia.se>, resident Net/Lunix/telecom geek.
Netia Data AB, Stockholm SWEDEN *46#7O466OI99#
10:09 p.m.
New subject: OT: LangSec (Re: A fuzzy awk.)
It may become hard to reconcile this with the
robustness principle
(Be conservative in what you send, be liberal in what you accept)
that Jon Postel popularized. Maybe it becomes necessary, though.
Yes; the LangSec people essentially reject the robustness principle.
See https://langsec.org/papers/postel-patch.pdf
-Ben
21 May
21 May
2:02 a.m.
New subject: OT: LangSec (Re: A fuzzy awk.)
It appears that Ben Kallus <benjamin.p.kallus.gr(a)dartmouth.edu> said:
On the contrary, they actually understand it.
Postel was widely misunderstood to say that you should try to accept
arbitrary garbage. People who knew him tell me that he meant to be
liberal when the spec is ambiguous, not to allow stuff that is just
wrong. As their quote from RFC 1122 points out, he also said you
should be prepared for arbitrary garbage so you can reject it.
R's,
John
It may become
hard to reconcile this with the robustness principle
(Be conservative in what you send, be liberal in what you accept)
that Jon Postel popularized. Maybe it becomes necessary, though.
Yes; the LangSec people essentially reject the robustness principle.
See https://langsec.org/papers/postel-patch.pdf 
2:11 a.m.
New subject: OT: LangSec (Re: A fuzzy awk.)
On Mon, May 20, 2024 at 04:02:26PM -0400, John Levine wrote:
It appears that Ben Kallus
<benjamin.p.kallus.gr(a)dartmouth.edu> said:
On the contrary, they actually understand it.
Postel was widely misunderstood to say that you should try to accept
arbitrary garbage. People who knew him tell me that he meant to be
liberal when the spec is ambiguous, not to allow stuff that is just
wrong. As their quote from RFC 1122 points out, he also said you
should be prepared for arbitrary garbage so you can reject it.
Yeah, I read the pdf and I took away the same thing as John.
--
---
Larry McVoy Retired to fishing http://www.mcvoy.com/lm/boat
It may
become hard to reconcile this with the robustness principle
(Be conservative in what you send, be liberal in what you accept)
that Jon Postel popularized. Maybe it becomes necessary, though.
Yes; the LangSec people essentially reject the robustness principle.
See https://langsec.org/papers/postel-patch.pdf
3 a.m.
New subject: OT: LangSec (Re: A fuzzy awk.)
What I meant was that the LangSec people reject the robustness
principle as it is commonly understood (i.e., make a "reasonable"
guess when receiving garbage), not necessarily that their view is
incompatible with Postel's original vision. This interpretation of the
principle is pretty widespread; take a look at the Nginx mailing list
if you have any doubt. I attribute this to the same phenomenon that
inverted the meaning of REST.
-Ben
3:03 a.m.
New subject: OT: LangSec (Re: A fuzzy awk.)
What I meant was that the LangSec people reject the
robustness
principle as it is commonly understood (i.e., make a "reasonable"
guess when receiving garbage), not necessarily that their view is
incompatible with Postel's original vision. This interpretation of the
principle is pretty widespread; take a look at the Nginx mailing list
if you have any doubt. I attribute this to the same phenomenon that
inverted the meaning of REST.
Oh, OK, no disagreement there. I'm as tired as you are of people invoking
Postel to excuse slovenly code.
Regards,
John Levine, johnl(a)taugh.com, Taughannock Networks, Trumansburg NY
Please consider the environment before reading this e-mail. https://jl.ly
3:14 a.m.
New subject: OT: LangSec (Re: A fuzzy awk.)
On Mon, May 20, 2024 at 05:00:40PM -0400, Ben Kallus wrote:
What I meant was that the LangSec people reject the
robustness
principle as it is commonly understood (i.e., make a "reasonable"
guess when receiving garbage)
That most certainly is not what I took from what Postel said. And I
say that as someone who designed a distributed system that had client
and server sides and had to make that work across versions from last
week to 10-20 years ago.
I took it more as "Be more and more careful what you say, get that more
correct with each release, but tolerate the less correct stuff you might
get from earlier versions". In no way did I think he meant ``make a
"reasonable" guess when receiving garbage''. Garbage is garbage, you
error on that.
--
---
Larry McVoy Retired to fishing http://www.mcvoy.com/lm/boat
3:46 a.m.
New subject: OT: LangSec (Re: A fuzzy awk.)
My point was that, regardless of Postel's original intent, many people
have interpreted his principle to mean that accepting garbage is good.
*This* interpretation is incompatible with LangSec.
See RFC 9413 for an exploration of the many interpretations of
Postel's principle.
-Ben
3:57 a.m.
New subject: OT: LangSec (Re: A fuzzy awk.)
Those would be the stupid people and you can't fix stupid. Seriously,
people can twist anything into anything. Just because dumb people
didn't understand his principle doesn't mean it was a bad principle.
On Mon, May 20, 2024 at 05:46:48PM -0400, Ben Kallus wrote:
My point was that, regardless of Postel's
original intent, many people
have interpreted his principle to mean that accepting garbage is good.
*This* interpretation is incompatible with LangSec.
See RFC 9413 for an exploration of the many interpretations of
Postel's principle.
-Ben
--
---
Larry McVoy Retired to fishing http://www.mcvoy.com/lm/boat
20 May
20 May
10:06 p.m.
On Mon, May 20, 2024 at 9:17 AM Douglas McIlroy <
douglas.mcilroy(a)dartmouth.edu> wrote:
I'm surprised by nonchalance about bad inputs
evoking bad program
behavior. That attitude may have been excusable 50 years ago. By now,
though, we have seen so much malicious exploitation of open avenues of
"undefined behavior" that we can no longer ignore bugs that "can't
happen
when using the tool correctly". Mature software should not brook incorrect
usage.
Accepting bad inputs can also lead to security issues. The data breaches
from
SQL-based attacks are a modern case in point.
IMO, as a programmer you owe it to your users to do your best to detect bad
input and to handle it in a graceful fashion. Nothing is more frustrating
to a user than to have a program blow up in their face with a seg fault, or
even worse, simply exit silently.
As the DEC compiler team's expert on object files, I was called on to add
object file support to a compiler back end originally targeted to VMS
only. I inherited support of the object file generator for Unix COFF and
later wrote the support for Microsoft PECOFF and ELF. When our group was
bought by Intel I did the object file support for Apple OS X MACH-O in the
Intel compiler back end.
I found that the folks who write linkers are particularly lazy about error
checking and error handling. They assume that the compiler always
generates clean object files. That's OK I suppose if the compiler and
linker people are in the same organization. If the linker falls over you
can just go down the hall and have the linker developer debug the issue and
tell you where you went wrong. But that doesn't work when they work for
different companies and the compiler person doesn't have access to the
linker sources. I ran into a lot of cases where my buggy object file
caused the linker to seg fault or, even worse, simply exit without an error
message.
I ended up writing a very thorough formatted dumper for each object file
format that did very thorough checking for proper syntax and as many
semantic errors (e.g., symbol table index number out of range) as I could.
-Paul W.
214
days inactive
216
days old
17 comments
11 participants
participants (11)
-
arnold＠skeeve.com -
Ben Kallus -
Chet Ramey -
Douglas McIlroy -
G. Branden Robinson -
John Levine -
John R Levine
-
Larry McVoy -
Paul Winalski -
Ralph Corderoy -
Åke Nordin