How not to fix buffer overflows

by Jens Alfke ⟿ July 16, 2007

This tale of woe is making me rethink whether I want to be running any PHP-based software on my website.

Yes, integer overflows happen to the best of us (even those of us who write popular algorithm textbooks), but I would hope that once one is pointed out, the people maintaining the code would have a clue about how to fix it.

Stuff like “if (size>INT_MAX)…” is funny, but I find it even scarier that someone would think the solution to integer overflow is to store potentially-huge byte counts in variables of type “float”. Which is apparently still being done in top-of-tree PHP.

[Hint: “float” is almost always 32-bit IEEE format with a 24-bit mantissa, meaning it can’t represent any integer larger than 2^23^–1 (8 MB) exactly. And round-off error is the last thing you want when computing how large a buffer to allocate.]