[vlc-devel] [vlc-commits] commit: httpd: gracefully handle too large request bodies (Pierre Ynard )

[Pierre Ynard]

> > httpd: gracefully handle too large request bodies
> > 
> > Return a 413 error instead of crashing
> 
> That won't really work the way you'd want though.
> 
> malloc() returns NULL if it's out of address space, but it does not
> usually return NULL if it's out of memory.

I'm aware.

> So in practice, this will catch ridiculously large Content-Length
> such as 2 gigabytes, but not large requests such as a few hundred
> megabytes.

You wish, I had to exhaust 4 petabytes of address space before my VLC
crashed.

> Instead, the process will get killed later when it tries to write and
> taint new memory pages.

At least an attacker has to actually do some work to trigger a crash
now.

There must be a rationale why this is desirable behavior from the OS?
Is this kind of memory allocation bad practice? Would it be better to
gradually realloc() the buffer while it's filled?

-- 
Pierre Ynard
"Une âme dans un corps, c'est comme un dessin sur une feuille de papier."