SECURITY CONSIDERATIONS
The strcat function is easily misused in a manner which enables malicious users to arbitrarily change a running program’s functionality through a buffer overflow attack. (See the FSA.) Avoid using strcat. Instead, use strncat or strlcat and ensure that no more characters are copied to the destination buffer than it can hold.
Note that strncat can also be problematic. It may be a security concern for a string to be truncated at all. Since the truncated string will not be as long as the original, it may refer to a completely different resource and usage of the truncated resource could result in very incorrect behavior. Example:
void
foo(const char *arbitrary_string)
{
char onstack[8];
#if defined(BAD)
/*
* This first strcat is bad behavior. Do not use strcat!
*/
(void)strcat(onstack, arbitrary_string); /* BAD! */
#elif defined(BETTER)
/*
* The following two lines demonstrate better use of
* strncat().
*/
(void)strncat(onstack, arbitrary_string,
sizeof(onstack) - strlen(onstack) - 1);
#elif defined(BEST)
/*
* These lines are even more robust due to testing for
* truncation.
*/
if (strlen(arbitrary_string) + 1 >
sizeof(onstack) - strlen(onstack))
err(1, "onstack would be truncated");
(void)strncat(onstack, arbitrary_string,
sizeof(onstack) - strlen(onstack) - 1);
#endif
}
SEE ALSO
bcopy(3), memccpy(3), memcpy(3), memmove(3), strcpy(3), strlcat(3), strlcpy(3)
.Rs "The FreeBSD Security Architecture"
.Re (See "/usr/share/doc/{to be decided}".)
STANDARDS
