[Python-Dev] PyErr_Format security note

[Greg Stein]

On Sun, 14 Nov 1999, A.M. Kuchling wrote:
> Making the caller responsible for this is error-prone.  The danger, of
> course, is a buffer overflow caused by generating an error string
> that's larger than the buffer, possibly letting people execute
> arbitrary code.  We could add a test to the configure script for
> vsnprintf() and use it when possible, but that only fixes the problem
> on platforms which have it.  Can we find an implementation of
> vsnprintf() someplace?

Apache has a safe implementation (they have reviewed the heck out of it
for obvious reasons :-).

In the Apache source distribution, it is located in src/ap/ap_snprintf.c.

Cheers,
-g

--
Greg Stein, http://www.lyra.org/