Wireshark · Wireshark-dev: [Wireshark-dev] Should we check value_strings for NULL termination while registering?

[Ulf Lamping <ulf.lamping@xxxxxx>]

Hi List!

It seems to be a common mistake to forget the terminating zero entry in a value_string, I've done this myself before and it's hard to track it down if you don't have a clue what's going wrong.

Even worse, this mistake might not make any problems for a long time as usually the values rushing in will be in the value_string (I've found my mistake by fuzz-testing).

We could automatically check the termination of the value_string (at least for the registered values) while registering the hf_ values. This will indicate the problem a lot earlier and at the place where it's caused (and not much, much later).

Of cause this has a drawback: Iterating trough all value_strings at registration will take a little bit of time at startup (didn't tried so don't know how long this will take).

What do others think: Is the added time overhead worth adding some extra robustness or are there other mechanisms possible to detect these kind of errors (e.g. static code analysis)?

Regards, ULFL
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