Your approach requires extra checks, though, which are easy to forget. Also, NULL is not guaranteed to be the stored as zeros, plus padding is going to make your life annoying.
The trick of checking that buffers are zeroed is purely a debugging tool, so it's okay if it doesn't work on some platforms. And if you allocate with calloc(), the padding will be zeroed for you. It's actually very rare that you will have to call memset() with this technique.
This is like the most clichéd way of saying “my code has security vulnerabilities” that there is. I have yet to see code that has remained secure solely on the “discipline” of programmers remembering to check things.
> The trick of checking that buffers are zeroed is purely a debugging tool, so it's okay if it doesn't work on some platforms.
Fair.
> And if you allocate with calloc(), the padding will be zeroed for you.
It might get unzeroed if you work with the memory.
Also, it's not just about vulns in security-critical code. It's also about ordinary bugs. Why not be a little more careful? It won't hurt.
> It might get unzeroed if you work with the memory.
Maybe, but it isn't very common. I'm not sure when the C standard allows changing padding bytes, but in practice the compilers I've used don't seem to do it. And again, it's just a debugging aid, if it causes too much trouble on some platform, just turn it off.
That's not what the parent comment said.
You retort: "I have yet to see code that has remained secure solely on the “discipline” of programmers remembering to check things."
I think that is a dishonest misrepresentation of what the parent comment said, isn't it?
Honestly, unless you really cannot afford it time-budget wise, I would just ship everything with ASAN, UBSAN, etc. and deal with the crash reports.
Left unsaid due to the fact I was out doing groceries this morning when I posted that was that I don't think this is even a very good practice in general, as I explained in more detail in other comments here.
You took the original argument, changed it to be fallacious, and used it as a strawman. That's what was dishonest about it.
Is that a real issue, though?
> padding is going to make your life annoying
Just memset?
> Is that a real issue, though?
Of course, it's not, but that's one of those factoids that everyone learns at some point and feels like needing to rub it into everyone else's face assuming that these poor schmucks are as oblivious to it as they once were. A circle of life and all that.