Chromium project finds that 70% of security defects are memory safety problems

Re:Chromium project finds that 70% of security defects are m... by vardump on Monday May 25, 2020 @05:23AM (#23299448)

Writing C++ code that leaks a std::vector is absolutely trivial, happens all the time and requires no skill.

  auto* v = new std::vector<char>();

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Re:Chromium project finds that 70% of security defects are m... by fluffything on Monday May 25, 2020 @06:16AM (#23299693)

I disagree in that it requires no skill: it requires the user to avoid doing the obvious thing:

    vector<int> foo {...};

and heap allocate a vector on the heap with `new` (without using a smart pointer), and then avoiding your linters warnings about this (e.g. clang-tidy).

If this is common in your place of work, I truly pity you.

Also, trading a call to `free` for a second call to malloc, and a second pointer indirection to the vector elements, isn't a very effective way of improving performance to beat the JVM. The whole idea behind leaking memory is doing less operations, not more :D

In Rust, leaking "the right way" is trivial (mem::forget is safe), but in C++, leaking the stack allocated vector probably requires putting it behind an union or aligned_storage or similar.

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