OWASP Developer Guide

Memory Management

12.1.8 Memory Management

Here is a collection of Do’s and Don’ts when it comes to memory management, gathered from practical experiences.

  • Check that the buffer is as large as specified
  • When using functions that accept a number of bytes to copy, such as strncpy(), be aware that if the destination buffer size is equal to the source buffer size, it may not NULL-terminate the string
  • Check buffer boundaries if calling the function in a loop and make sure there is no danger of writing past the allocated space
  • Truncate all input strings to a reasonable length before passing them to the copy and concatenation functions
  • Specifically close resources, do not rely on garbage collection. (for example connection objects, file handles, etc.)
  • Properly free allocated memory upon the completion of functions and at all exit points.

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