undefined behavior (-Wvarargs) in security/keys/trusted.c#TSS_authhmac()

James Bottomley jejb at linux.vnet.ibm.com
Thu Oct 11 16:10:03 UTC 2018


On Thu, 2018-10-11 at 18:02 +0200, Arnd Bergmann wrote:
> On 10/10/18, Nick Desaulniers <ndesaulniers at google.com> wrote:
> > Hello,
> > I noticed that compiling with
> > CONFIG_TCG_TPM=y
> > CONFIG_HW_RANDOM_TPM=y
> > and Clang produced the warning:
> > 
> >   CC      security/keys/trusted.o
> > security/keys/trusted.c:146:17: warning: passing an object that
> > undergoes default
> >       argument promotion to 'va_start' has undefined behavior [-
> > Wvarargs]
> >         va_start(argp, h3);
> >                        ^
> > security/keys/trusted.c:126:37: note: parameter of type 'unsigned
> > char' is declared here
> > unsigned char *h2, unsigned char h3, ...)
> >                                ^
> > 
> > Specifically, it seems that both the C90 (4.8.1.1) and C11
> > (7.16.1.4) standards explicitly call this out as undefined
> > behavior:
> > 
> > The parameter parmN is the identifier of the rightmost parameter in
> > the variable parameter list in the function definition (the one
> > just before the ...). If the parameter parmN is declared with ...
> > or with a type that is not compatible with the type that results
> > after application of the default argument promotions, the behavior
> > is undefined.
> > 
> > So if I understand my C promotion/conversion rules correctly,
> > unsigned char would be promoted to int?
> > 
> > We had a few ideas for possible fixes in:
> > https://github.com/ClangBuiltLinux/linux/issues/41
> 
> I arrived at a similar patch as the one cited there, but it broke
> again after an 'extern' declaration was added in
> include/keys/trusted.h, so that has to be patched as well now

They look either over complicated or potentially problematic.  since
this is an internal API and a char * is always legal, what's wrong with
simply swapping h2 and h3?

James



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