Nix integer overflow is implemented by undefined behavior #10968
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This issue has been mentioned on NixOS Discourse. There might be relevant details there: https://discourse.nixos.org/t/2024-06-26-nix-team-meeting-minutes-156/47740/1 |
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Jul 25, 2024
This also bans various sneaking of negative numbers from the language into unsuspecting builtins as was exposed while auditing the consequences of changing the Nix language integer type to a newtype. It's unlikely that this change comprehensively ensures correctness when passing integers out of the Nix language and we should probably add a checked-narrowing function or something similar, but that's out of scope for the immediate change. During the development of this I found a few fun facts about the language: - You could overflow integers by converting from unsigned JSON values. - You could overflow unsigned integers by converting negative numbers into them when going into Nix config, into fetchTree, and into flake inputs. The flake inputs and Nix config cannot actually be tested properly since they both ban thunks, however, we put in checks anyway because it's possible these could somehow be used to do such shenanigans some other way. Note that Lix has banned Nix language integer overflows since the very first public beta, but threw a SIGILL about them because we run with -fsanitize=signed-overflow -fsanitize-undefined-trap-on-error in production builds. Since the Nix language uses signed integers, overflow was simply undefined behaviour, and since we defined that to trap, it did. Trapping on it was a bad UX, but we didn't even entirely notice that we had done this at all until it was reported as a bug a couple of months later (which is, to be fair, that flag working as intended), and it's got enough production time that, aside from code that is IMHO buggy (and which is, in any case, not in nixpkgs) such as https://git.lix.systems/lix-project/lix/issues/445, we don't think anyone doing anything reasonable actually depends on wrapping overflow. Even for weird use cases such as doing funny bit crimes, it doesn't make sense IMO to have wrapping behaviour, since two's complement arithmetic overflow behaviour is so *aggressively* not what you want for *any* kind of mathematics/algorithms. The Nix language exists for package management, a domain where bit crimes are already only dubiously in scope to begin with, and it makes a lot more sense for that domain for the integers to never lose precision, either by throwing errors if they would, or by being arbitrary-precision. Fixes: NixOS#10968 Original-CL: https://gerrit.lix.systems/c/lix/+/1596 Change-Id: I51f253840c4af2ea5422b8a420aa5fafbf8fae75
lf-
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Jul 26, 2024
This also bans various sneaking of negative numbers from the language into unsuspecting builtins as was exposed while auditing the consequences of changing the Nix language integer type to a newtype. It's unlikely that this change comprehensively ensures correctness when passing integers out of the Nix language and we should probably add a checked-narrowing function or something similar, but that's out of scope for the immediate change. During the development of this I found a few fun facts about the language: - You could overflow integers by converting from unsigned JSON values. - You could overflow unsigned integers by converting negative numbers into them when going into Nix config, into fetchTree, and into flake inputs. The flake inputs and Nix config cannot actually be tested properly since they both ban thunks, however, we put in checks anyway because it's possible these could somehow be used to do such shenanigans some other way. Note that Lix has banned Nix language integer overflows since the very first public beta, but threw a SIGILL about them because we run with -fsanitize=signed-overflow -fsanitize-undefined-trap-on-error in production builds. Since the Nix language uses signed integers, overflow was simply undefined behaviour, and since we defined that to trap, it did. Trapping on it was a bad UX, but we didn't even entirely notice that we had done this at all until it was reported as a bug a couple of months later (which is, to be fair, that flag working as intended), and it's got enough production time that, aside from code that is IMHO buggy (and which is, in any case, not in nixpkgs) such as https://git.lix.systems/lix-project/lix/issues/445, we don't think anyone doing anything reasonable actually depends on wrapping overflow. Even for weird use cases such as doing funny bit crimes, it doesn't make sense IMO to have wrapping behaviour, since two's complement arithmetic overflow behaviour is so *aggressively* not what you want for *any* kind of mathematics/algorithms. The Nix language exists for package management, a domain where bit crimes are already only dubiously in scope to begin with, and it makes a lot more sense for that domain for the integers to never lose precision, either by throwing errors if they would, or by being arbitrary-precision. Fixes: NixOS#10968 Original-CL: https://gerrit.lix.systems/c/lix/+/1596 Change-Id: I51f253840c4af2ea5422b8a420aa5fafbf8fae75
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Describe the bug
See https://git.lix.systems/lix-project/lix/issues/423
Steps To Reproduce
Expected behavior
I'm inclined to make it throw instead.
If that is a problem, we may revisit. Have some thoughts on how; see https://git.lix.systems/lix-project/lix/issues/423#issuecomment-4604
nix-env --versionoutputAdditional context
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