strncpys in libpcap should be strlcp about libpcap HOT 6 OPEN

Commit bf2270d addressed NULL termination part of this report in 2002.

from libpcap.

strlcpy(), which boils to strncpy() with NULL termination enforced, isn't portable. For example, my Linux host doesn't include it. There is an article explaining that just having strlcpy() in the code doesn't result in guaranteed security: http://lwn.net/Articles/507319/

A sufficient scope of this request would be to check that all strncpy() instances handle NULL termination.

from libpcap.

There were already some strlcpy()s in pcap-linux.c; I converted the remainder of them to fix some Coverity issues. We have a fallback version of snprintf(); we should perhaps have a fallback version of strlcpy() as well, just as tcpdump does.

The strncpy()s and strcpy()s I converted are for ioctls on the interface; we should probably check, in the create routine on Linux, whether the name passed in is too big for those ioctls and, if so, return "no such device" (because the Linux kernel presumably won't create network interfaces whose names won't fit in those ioctls - if it does, that's a kernel bug).

from libpcap.

we should probably check, in the create routine on Linux, whether the name passed in is too big for those ioctls and, if so, return "no such device"

Or in the activate routine; I've added that check in 1099050.

from libpcap.

pcap-int.h has

#ifndef HAVE_STRLCPY
#define strlcpy(x, y, z) \
        (strncpy((x), (y), (z)), \
         ((z) <= 0 ? 0 : ((x)[(z) - 1] = '\0')), \
         strlen((y)))
#endif

and the libpcap configure script checks for strlcpy(), so if it's missing, we have a macro that does the right thing using strncpy().

from libpcap.

we should probably check, in the create routine on Linux, whether the name passed in is too big for those ioctls and, if so, return "no such device"

Or in the activate routine; I've added that check in 1099050.

Done in pcap-bpf.c as well, with various commits.

I'll look at cleaning up the (ancient) remaining code that's using strncpy().

from libpcap.