netdev - Re: [PATCH] wireguard: noise: Add __nonstring annotations for unterminated strings

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Message-ID: <202503111520.CF7527A@keescook>
Date: Tue, 11 Mar 2025 15:30:07 -0700
From: Kees Cook <kees@...nel.org>
To: Jakub Kicinski <kuba@...nel.org>
Cc: "Jason A . Donenfeld" <Jason@...c4.com>,
	Andrew Lunn <andrew+netdev@...n.ch>,
	"David S. Miller" <davem@...emloft.net>,
	Eric Dumazet <edumazet@...gle.com>, Paolo Abeni <pabeni@...hat.com>,
	wireguard@...ts.zx2c4.com, netdev@...r.kernel.org,
	James Bottomley <James.Bottomley@...senpartnership.com>,
	Jack Wang <jinpu.wang@...ud.ionos.com>,
	"Martin K. Petersen" <martin.petersen@...cle.com>,
	linux-scsi@...r.kernel.org, linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org,
	linux-hardening@...r.kernel.org
Subject: Re: [PATCH] wireguard: noise: Add __nonstring annotations for
 unterminated strings

On Tue, Mar 11, 2025 at 11:19:27AM +0100, Jakub Kicinski wrote:
> On Mon, 10 Mar 2025 15:22:50 -0700 Kees Cook wrote:
> > When a character array without a terminating NUL character has a static
> > initializer, GCC 15's -Wunterminated-string-initialization will only
> > warn if the array lacks the "nonstring" attribute[1]. Mark the arrays
> > with __nonstring to and correctly identify the char array as "not a C
> > string" and thereby eliminate the warning.
> 
> Hi! Would marking all of u8 as non-string not be an option? How many 
> of such warnings do we have in the tree? Feel free to point me to a
> previous conversation.

*thread merge*

On Mon, Mar 10, 2025 at 06:38:01PM -0400, James Bottomley wrote[1]:
> This looks a bit suboptimal ... is there anywhere in the kernel u8[] is
> actually used for real strings?  In which case it would seem the better
> place to put the annotation is in the typedef for u8 arrays.

So both of you asked basically same question, and I think the simple answer
is "no we can't mark u8 as nonstring". The use of u8 has become
synonymous with "char" for a long while now, and it's gotten even more
common after we made char unsigned by default.

The number of warning sources is pretty small. I think I have identified
and proposed fixes most of them already[2]. ACPICA needs an upstream
change, which I've submitted[3]. And ACPI needed multidimensional
nonstring annotation support, which had the last needed bit added to GCC
today[4], and I've proposed support for it in the kernel[5]. With 4 and 5
ready, I can send the final patch, which is basically just this (and
actually accounts for the vast majority of warnings emitted):

-static const char table_sigs[][ACPI_NAMESEG_SIZE] __initconst = {
+static const char table_sigs[][ACPI_NAMESEG_SIZE] __nonstring_array __initconst = {

-Kees

[1] https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/98ca3727d65a418e403b03f6b17341dbcb192764.camel@HansenPartnership.com/
[2] https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/?q=f%3AKees+%22-Wunterminated-string-initialization%22
[3] https://github.com/acpica/acpica/pull/1006
[4] https://github.com/gcc-mirror/gcc/commit/afb46540d3921e96c4cd7ba8fa2c8b0901759455
[5] https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/20250310214244.work.194-kees@kernel.org/

-- 
Kees Cook