How could reading numbers using sscanf crash?

Question

Cppcheck has detected a potential problem in a code like this:

float a, b, c;
int count = sscanf(data, "%f,%f,%f", &a, &b, &c);

It says that: "scanf without field width limits can crash with huge data". How is that possible? Is that a known bug in some sscanf implementations? I understand that the numbers may overflow (numerically), but how could the program crash? Is that a false positive in cppcheck?

I have found a similar question: scanf Cppcheck warning, but the answer is not completely satisfying. The answer mentions type safety, but that should not be an issue here.

Answer 1

I am a Cppcheck developer.

Yes this is a weird crash. With "huge data" it means millions of digits.

If you use the --verbose flag then cppcheck will actually write a little example code that usually crashes on linux computers.

Here is an example code that crashes with a segmentation fault on my Ubuntu 11.10 computer:

#include <stdio.h>

#define HUGE_SIZE 100000000

int main()
{
    int i;
    char *data = new char[HUGE_SIZE];
    for (int i = 0; i < HUGE_SIZE; ++i)
        data[i] = '1';
    data[HUGE_SIZE-1] = 0;
    sscanf(data, "%i", &i);
    delete [] data;
    return 0;
}

For your info I don't get a crash when I try this example code on visual studio.

I used g++ version 4.6.1 to compile.

Answer 2

The segmentation fault seems to be a bug in glibc.

I've just tested this with a similar program, which crashes in ubuntu 10.04, but works in ubuntu 12.04.

As Daniel Marjamäki said, his program crashes in 11.10, I believe the bug is fixed in between.