Testing pointers for validity (C/C++)

Question

Is there any way to determine (programatically, of course) if a given pointer is "valid"? Checking for NULL is easy, but what about things like 0x00001234? When trying to dereference this kind of pointer an exception/crash occurs.

A cross-platform method is preferred, but platform-specific (for Windows and Linux) is also ok.

Update for clarification: The problem is not with stale/freed/uninitialized pointers; instead, I'm implementing an API that takes pointers from the caller (like a pointer to a string, a file handle, etc.). The caller can send (in purpose or by mistake) an invalid value as the pointer. How do I prevent a crash?

Answer 1

It is not a very good policy to accept arbitrary pointers as input parameters in a public API. It's better to have "plain data" types like an integer, a string or a struct (I mean a classical struct with plain data inside, of course; officially anything can be a struct).

Why? Well because as others say there is no standard way to know whether you've been given a valid pointer or one that points to junk.

But sometimes you don't have the choice - your API must accept a pointer.

In these cases, it is the duty of the caller to pass a good pointer. NULL may be accepted as a value, but not a pointer to junk.

Can you double-check in any way? Well, what I did in a case like that was to define an invariant for the type the pointer points to, and call it when you get it (in debug mode). At least if the invariant fails (or crashes) you know that you were passed a bad value.

// API that does not allow NULL
void PublicApiFunction1(Person* in_person)
{
  assert(in_person != NULL);
  assert(in_person->Invariant());

  // Actual code...
}

// API that allows NULL
void PublicApiFunction2(Person* in_person)
{
  assert(in_person == NULL || in_person->Invariant());

  // Actual code (must keep in mind that in_person may be NULL)
}

Answer 2

It's unbelievable how much misleading information you can read in articles above...

And even in microsoft msdn documentation IsBadPtr is claimed to be banned. Oh well - I prefer working application rather than crashing. Even if term working might be working incorrectly (as long as end-user can continue with application).

By googling I haven't found any useful example for windows - found a solution for 32-bit apps,

http://www.codeproject.com/script/Content/ViewAssociatedFile.aspx?rzp=%2FKB%2Fsystem%2Fdetect-driver%2F%2FDetectDriverSrc.zip&zep=DetectDriverSrc%2FDetectDriver%2Fsrc%2FdrvCppLib%2Frtti.cpp&obid=58895&obtid=2&ovid=2

but I need also to support 64-bit apps, so this solution did not work for me.

But I've harvested wine's source codes, and managed to cook similar kind of code which would work for 64-bit apps as well - attaching code here:

#include <typeinfo.h>   

typedef void (*v_table_ptr)();   

typedef struct _cpp_object   
{   
    v_table_ptr*    vtable;   
} cpp_object;   



#ifndef _WIN64
typedef struct _rtti_object_locator
{
    unsigned int signature;
    int base_class_offset;
    unsigned int flags;
    const type_info *type_descriptor;
    //const rtti_object_hierarchy *type_hierarchy;
} rtti_object_locator;
#else

typedef struct
{
    unsigned int signature;
    int base_class_offset;
    unsigned int flags;
    unsigned int type_descriptor;
    unsigned int type_hierarchy;
    unsigned int object_locator;
} rtti_object_locator;  

#endif

/* Get type info from an object (internal) */  
static const rtti_object_locator* RTTI_GetObjectLocator(void* inptr)  
{   
    cpp_object* cppobj = (cpp_object*) inptr;  
    const rtti_object_locator* obj_locator = 0;   

    if (!IsBadReadPtr(cppobj, sizeof(void*)) &&   
        !IsBadReadPtr(cppobj->vtable - 1, sizeof(void*)) &&   
        !IsBadReadPtr((void*)cppobj->vtable[-1], sizeof(rtti_object_locator)))  
    {  
        obj_locator = (rtti_object_locator*) cppobj->vtable[-1];  
    }  

    return obj_locator;  
}  

And following code can detect whether pointer is valid or not, you need probably to add some NULL checking:

    CTest* t = new CTest();
    //t = (CTest*) 0;
    //t = (CTest*) 0x12345678;

    const rtti_object_locator* ptr = RTTI_GetObjectLocator(t);  

#ifdef _WIN64
    char *base = ptr->signature == 0 ? (char*)RtlPcToFileHeader((void*)ptr, (void**)&base) : (char*)ptr - ptr->object_locator;
    const type_info *td = (const type_info*)(base + ptr->type_descriptor);
#else
    const type_info *td = ptr->type_descriptor;
#endif
    const char* n =td->name();

This gets class name from pointer - I think it should be enough for your needs.

One thing which I'm still afraid is performance of pointer checking - in code snipet above there is already 3-4 API calls being made - might be overkill for time critical applications.

It would be good if someone could measure overhead of pointer checking compared for example to C#/managed c++ calls.

Answer 3

In general, it's impossible to do. Here's one particularly nasty case:

struct Point2d {
    int x;
    int y;
};

struct Point3d {
    int x;
    int y;
    int z;
};

void dump(Point3 *p)
{
    printf("[%d %d %d]\n", p->x, p->y, p->z);
}

Point2d points[2] = { {0, 1}, {2, 3} };
Point3d *p3 = reinterpret_cast<Point3d *>(&points[0]);
dump(p3);

On many platforms, this will print out:

[0 1 2]

You're forcing the runtime system to incorrectly interpret bits of memory, but in this case it's not going to crash, because the bits all make sense. This is part of the design of the language (look at C-style polymorphism with struct inaddr, inaddr_in, inaddr_in6), so you can't reliably protect against it on any platform.

Answer 4

Indeed, something could be done under specific occasion: for example if you want to check whether a string pointer string is valid, using write(fd, buf, szie) syscall can help you do the magic: let fd be a file descriptor of temporary file you create for test, and buf pointing to the string you are tesing, if the pointer is invalid write() would return -1 and errno set to EFAULT which indicating that buf is outside your accessible address space.

Answer 5

AFAIK there is no way. You should try to avoid this situation by always setting pointers to NULL after freeing memory.

Answer 6

I have seen various libraries use some method to check for unreferenced memory and such. I believe they simply "override" the memory allocation and deallocation methods (malloc/free), which has some logic that keeps track of the pointers. I suppose this is overkill for your use case, but it would be one way to do it.