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Comment by zbentley

2 days ago

Well, it was intentional, but not in the way I think you mean.

musl switched to returning `*` so folks stopped accidentally using NULL results, which was causing crashes and risked false-positives comparing NULL to itself.

That was a misfeature and should never have been implemented. But I bet it was an easy band-aid change to make!

35 comments

zbentley

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ghostly_s  2 days ago

But choosing "*" as the character to return is an insane choice for anyone who knows the basics of linux sysadmin, or hell anyone who's ever used a search field in any context and thus knows it is ubiquitously used as a wildcard operator.

  • pdw  2 days ago

    But it fits the common Linux implementation of the function... e.g. the Debian manpage says:

    > Upon error, crypt_r, crypt_rn, and crypt_ra write an invalid hash to the _output_ field of their _data_ argument, and crypt writes an invalid hash to its static storage area. This string will be shorter than 13 characters, will begin with a ‘*’, and will not compare equal to _setting_.

  • cloudfudge  2 days ago

    It's almost sensible if you only think of one side. It's like if /etc/passwd put "NO_PASSWORD" in the field for disabled logins and someone was like, oh, I'll be clever and say crypt() returns "NO_PASSWORD" on error because that's obviously invalid and won't match. But that's exactly what *does* make it match.

bch  2 days ago

> musl switched to returning `*` so folks stopped accidentally using NULL results, which was causing crashes and risked false-positives comparing NULL to itself.

Of all the things to mitigate...

1) crashing should be an option - it noisily indicates "there's a problem" and if it faults and dumps core, you've got a guided tour of your problem.

2) Is testing NULL as a passable option likely? I'd guess a more likely idiom is:

  if(NULL==(str=somefunc(arg1, arg2))){
    return err;
  }

  • xp84  2 days ago

    > crashing should be an option

    Wise words. I think early in my career I tended towards coding as defensively[1] as possible in a very specific way of "don't crash", as I definitely was not working in codebases I felt I had a full picture of. "I don't know who calls this method, and I don't want to get a call in the middle of the night that I broke prod" so I would say, return an empty string when asked to format a datetime except I'm passed a string or an int. (Yes, I was working in dynamic, untyped languages, too).

    Later on, even in untyped languages, I came around more to "Throw loud and specific exceptions when asked to do things that are nonsensical" - it requires more overall cojones though because it may cause "your code" to crash. But the realization I came to was that it's better to crash ('a MaliciouslyLongPasswordError was uncaught') because "AuthManager asked PasswordService to check a password that was 2MB long" than to paper that over until something like this comes out. Or, the more common situation, you're passed garbage, you return something that won't choke the caller at the time, but what it saves to the database in that scenario ends up being corrupt data. 6 months later someone notices, and has to sort out a data mess that may or may not be recoverable.

    [1] note that most "code defensively" advice is good. What I was doing could be thought of as a foolish misinterpretation of the phrase.

  • PokestarFan  2 days ago

    I think the issue is that a lot of callers were not aware that crypt() could error at all and all the issues are downstream of that. If OpenSSH knew that crypt() could error they would have handled it (possibly by inspecting errno).

    • creata  2 days ago

      I don't think that's the problem. The man page for crypt clearly says that erroring is a possibility and that it's not standardized how it errors:

      > The behavior of crypt on errors isn't well standardized. Some implementations simply can't fail (except by crashing the program), others return a null pointer or a fixed string. Most implementations don't set errno, but some do. POSIX specifies returning a null pointer and setting errno, but it defines only one possible error, ENOSYS, in the case where crypt is not supported at all.

      In my opinion the problem is that the behavior of crypt is underspecified - it isn't even specified how it signals failure, which is shocking.

      Another disturbing decision that crypt's signature takes in the hash its output is supposed to be compared against - if it weren't for that, this half-baked "on error the output won't compare equal to the input" measure that crypt and crypt_* use wouldn't have been possible.

      You can't check errno to see if there was a failure because, as the man page says, the value of errno is unspecified when crypt succeeds.

      2 replies →

za_creature  2 days ago

As opposed to the false positives returned by comparing '*' to itself.

Why * specifically? Why not some random guid generated before committing, if it's so important to not let buggy software crash?

  • zbentley  2 days ago

    I'm agreeing with you, to be clear.

    But buggy software might not crash; it might compare NULL == NULL and misbehave, instead.

    So there's really no good option here, which is why C is a rancid choice of language for publicly-usable APIs. But we're stuck with it. So it goes.