securitymemory-safety

Memory Safety

C's primary vulnerability class. Buffer overflows, use-after-free, and integer issues remain the top attack vectors in native code.

ikigai Application

talloc mitigates but doesn't eliminate: Hierarchical ownership prevents leaks but not overflows or UAF within a context's lifetime.

Critical patterns:

• Bounds check ALL array access before use
• Validate sizes before allocation: if (n > SIZE_MAX / elem_size) return ERR(...)
• Never trust size values from external sources
• Use talloc_array() not manual multiplication

Integer overflow risks:

• size_t multiplication for buffer sizes
• Signed/unsigned conversion in comparisons
• Off-by-one in loop bounds

Detection tools:

• ASan (make BUILD=sanitize) - buffer overflow, UAF
• UBSan - undefined behavior, integer overflow
• Valgrind - memory errors, leaks

Review red flags: Manual pointer arithmetic, memcpy with computed sizes, array indexing without bounds check.