Hi Zhoulai,
I appreciate you following up on this, and for your patience. I have
just committed a fix to the git repository which should address the
issue. I added a check on the input parameter 'f' which returns an error
if it is out of range.
Best regards,
Patrick
On 4/16/22 08:46, Zhoulai Fu wrote:
I just found out that the buffer overflow issue I reported years ago (see
below) remains in the recent version of GSL (just tested on the newest one
on GitHub). Is this issue something we plan to fix? I am asking since
now computing quantiles with GSL, or anything depending on it, seems not
secure.
BR,
Zhoulai
On Thu, Dec 3, 2020 at 11:12 PM Zhoulai Fu@Gmail <zhoulai...@gmail.com>
wrote:
Running the following code (also attached as a file) triggers a
segmentation error.
*#include <stdio.h>#include <gsl/gsl_sort.h>#include
<gsl/gsl_statistics.h>int main(void){ double upperq; double data[5] =
{17.2, 18.1, 16.5, 18.3, 12.6}; gsl_sort (data, 1, 5); upperq =
gsl_stats_quantile_from_sorted_data (data, 1, 5, 675); return 0;}// gcc
statsort_bug.c -lgsl -lgslcblas; ./a.out*
The error points to statistics/quantiles_source.c:41:
* result = (1 - delta) * sorted_data[lhs * stride] + delta *
sorted_data[(lhs + 1) * stride] ;*
The segmentation error is due to a stack buffer overflow (where
lhs=2700, strid=1 as shown in GDB). The bug could be exploited for
security attack, knowing that it occurs when the quantile "f" is
beyond the expected [0,1] range (f=675 in this case).
BR,
Zhoulai
