[gnutls-devel] GnuTLS | Allocate pathname on heap instead of on stack (!1493)

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Tim Rühsen commented:


Using PATH_MAX (from gnulib) vs an unbound heap allocation should at least considered.

The pros are
- no costly heap memory allocation for temporary strings
- less overhead (free) / no need to track pointers when prematurly exiting a function
- no risk of double free or NULL pointer access
- bounded (stack) allocation seems to be more "secure" than an unbounded heap allocation (that might turn into a DOS attack vector)
- library functions that do not allocate memory are preferable; there are situations where runtime allocations are just not allowed in an application except for the initialization phase

The cons are
- possibly stack overflow on system with a small stack (not sure, but doesn't Windows have a small stack by default ?)
- GNU/Hurd has no limits on the path size. But IMO it seems to be ok to limit PATH_MAX to 4096.

So my question clearly is: why did you decide against the gnulib module ?

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