bug in smail 2.5

Al Kiecker alan at s5000.rsvl.unisys.com
Thu Jun 6 04:19:59 AEST 1991


A bug recently was found in smail 2.5 that you may be interested in.
Our system does not clear out user memory prior to use, so uninitialized
variables can cause us problems. Such was the case in alias.c of smail 2.5. 

The node structures addrstk and fliststk only had the horz member initialized. 
Since addrstk.string was not initialized, this caused an illegal instruction 
and resultant core dump in strcmpic (str.c).

The following code change (alias.c, lines 103-108) is recommended:

	addr  = &addrstk;
	flist = &fliststk;
	user  = ubuf;

	addr->horz = NNULL;
	addr->vert = NNULL;				/*awk,6/6/91*/
	addr->string = "";				/*awk,6/6/91*/
	flist->horz  = NNULL;
	flist->vert = NNULL;				/*awk,6/6/91*/
	flist->string = "";				/*awk,6/6/91*/


=============
Al Kiecker				UUCP: 	alan at rsvl.unisys.com
UNISYS - Open Architecture & Products		uunet!s5000!alan
Roseville,MN 			AT&T: 	612-635-7240
-- 
Al Kiecker				UUCP: 	alan at rsvl.unisys.com
UNISYS - Open Architecture & Products		uunet!s5000!alan
Roseville,MN 			AT&T: 	612-635-7240



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