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Out of bounds heap read in shred / coreutils

Posted by Hanno Böck on
The GNU Coreutils project has just released the new version 8.25 which fixes an out of bounds heap read bug in the shred tool that I reported. It is a nice example of the subtle bugs one can find by testing code with address sanitizer.

shred is a tool to overwrite files with random data before deleting them. It generates a random memory pattern and in this pattern generation there was a heap overread. Due to the random pattern generation this bug is not deterministic and one has to run shred with certain parameters (for example -n 20) multiple times to trigger it.

Upstream bug report
Git commit / fix
Coreutils 8.25 release notes

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