On Monday 06 September 2010 10:47:54, Henning Thielemann wrote: > Daniel Fischer schrieb: > > On Sunday 05 September 2010 21:52:44, Henning Thielemann wrote: > >> Daniel Fischer schrieb: > >>> Yes. Ordinarily, lines in text files aren't longer than a few > >>> hundred characters, leaking those, who cares? > >> > >> I got several space leaks of this kind in the past. They are very > >> annoying. They are especially annoying if input comes from the > >> outside world, where people can attack them to crash your program > >> because of memory exhaustion. > > > > That would likely be the case of long lines, wouldn't it? > > I have trouble imagining a scenario where `lines' holding on to a few > > hundred characters which could already be released causes a noticeable > > space leak, let alone memory exhaustion. > > I talked about an _attack_! I provide a program that processes external > data (say a webserver, for instance one for an ICFP contest) and someone > feeds it intentionally with megabytes of text without any line ending.
Yes, that's absolutely a problem. I was irritated/confused by the selection of text you quoted which was only about the ordinary case of relatively short lines. I didn't originally think about an attack but only about accidental long lines, which make it important enough to fix lines' leak. Throw a possible attack in, and it's urgent to fix it. _______________________________________________ Haskell-Cafe mailing list [email protected] http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
