Improving GCC Buffer Overflow Detection for C Flexible Array Members (Oracle)
Date:
Sun, 23 Nov 2025 16:08:32 +0000
Description:
The Oracle blog has a
lengthy article on enhancements to GCC to help detect overflows of
flexible array members (FAMs) in C programs. We describe here two new GNU extensions which specify size
information for FAMs. These are a new attribute,
" counted_by " and a new builtin function,
" __builtin_counted_by_ref ". Both extensions can be used in
GNU C applications to specify size information for FAMs, improving
the buffer overflow detection for FAMs in general. This work has been covered on LWN as well.
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Link to news story:
https://lwn.net/Articles/1047547/
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