Use of Potentially Dangerous Function

Demonstrations

The following examples help to illustrate the nature of this weakness and describe methods or techniques which can be used to mitigate the risk.

Note that the examples here are by no means exhaustive and any given weakness may have many subtle varieties, each of which may require different detection methods or runtime controls.

Example One

The following code attempts to create a local copy of a buffer to perform some manipulations to the data.

void manipulate_string(char * string){
  char buf[24];
  strcpy(buf, string);
  ...
}

However, the programmer does not ensure that the size of the data pointed to by string will fit in the local buffer and copies the data with the potentially dangerous strcpy() function. This may result in a buffer overflow condition if an attacker can influence the contents of the string parameter.

See Also