It _is_ possible in theory to use gets safely, as long as your standard input is trusted. For instance, if a process forks and connects the standard input in the child to a pipe from the parent, which always writes a fixed amount of data to the pipe, you can use gets() without risk of overflow.
(This is a really contrived scenario, but I don't know of any simpler one where using gets() is safe.)
Only if we define "trusted" to include "known to be bug free" in e.g. it's truncation or bounding of output over the pipe to the child. I argue that, in theory, this is impossible to know, and thus that it this level of trust is impossible, and thus that this is not an example of a potential safe use of gets.
Even a mathematical proof of safety, after all, could contain errors - or could prove the wrong thing - or could apply to the code as written and not the code as messed with by your optimizer - or another thread - or an injected dll - or ...
> For instance, if a process forks and connects the standard input in the child to a pipe from the parent, which always writes a fixed amount of data to the pipe, you can use gets() without risk of overflow.
This is also insufficient - one must also prevent nonstandard invocations of the child process. Even if your normal parent process gives the child input that is 100% safe, that's no guarantee that an attacker won't launch your child process in an unusual manner. If the child process is suid, for example, this would be a potential avenue for privilege escalation.
"In the security engineering subspecialty of computer science, a trusted system is a system that is relied upon to a specified extent to enforce a specified security policy. As such, a trusted system is one whose failure may break a specified security policy." -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trusted_system
That's the definition of "trusted" I'm using.
> This is also insufficient - one must also prevent nonstandard invocations of the child process.
I'm thinking of pure fork(), not fork+exec. That is, the child process is the same executable image, so the only way to invoke the child process in a nonstandard way would be through a debugger. And that is why the child process can trust the parent process in my example: they're the same process until the fork().
(As I said, it's a really contrived scenario. In more realistic scenarios, gets() is unsafe.)
Which thankfully was removed by recent standard revisions of C and C++, meaning a compliant compiler isn't required to provide it any longer.
As far as I can tell glibc's implementation is probably what the people who designed getenv in the first place had in mind, just return a pointer to a global buffer. At best FreeBSD managed to create a workaround for modern environments.
There are unfortunately many such oddities in the standard libc APIs, remnants from an other time. Let us remember that "gets" was standardized as part of the C standard at some point, a function that's by design literally impossible to use safely.