1530142 - Adding new secure function for memory clearing proposal

Status: NEW

(NSPR :: NSPR, enhancement, P3)

Description

[devnexen]

Attachment: nspr.diff

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_14_3) AppleWebKit/605.1.15 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/12.0.3 Safari/605.1.15

Comment 1

[devnexen]

Any opinion on this one ? :-)

Comment 2

[J.C. Jones [:jcj] (he/they)]

Kai, can you comment here?

Comment 3

[Kai Engert [:KaiE:]]

We'd require an implementation that achieves the promised behavior on all platforms.
Are you certain your implementation does that?

Can you show why using memset, combined with a volatile function pointer, guarantees that it isn't optimized away, on all platforms?

It seems some platforms offer the system library call explicit_bzero. Why not use it on those platforms?

Comment 4

[devnexen]

I knew about explicit_bzero (explicit_memset for NetBSD) etc ... it was basically to reduce the ifdef ... lines but if preferred we can go with the platform specific solutions.

Comment 5

[Mike Hommey [:glandium]]

What's the motivation behind this? Why should anyone prefer to use a NSPR function rather than use what's provided by the C standard?

Comment 6

[BugBot [:suhaib / :marco]]

The bug assignee is inactive on Bugzilla, so the assignee is being reset.