Is it not possible to make a C++ application “Crash Proof”?

Question

Let's say we have an SDK in C++ that accepts some binary data (like a picture) and does something. Is it not possible to make this SDK "crash-proof"? By crash I primarily mean forceful termination by the OS upon memory access violation, due to invalid input passed by the user (like an abnormally short junk data).

I have no experience with C++, but when I googled, I found several means that sounded like a solution (use a vector instead of an array, configure the compiler so that automatic bounds check is performed, etc.).

When I presented this to the developer, he said it is still not possible.. Not that I don't believe him, but if so, how is language like Java handling this? I thought the JVM performs everytime a bounds check. If so, why can't one do the same thing in C++ manually?

UPDATE
By "Crash proof" I don't mean that the application does not terminate. I mean it should not abruptly terminate without information of what happened (I mean it will dump core etc., but is it not possible to display a message like "Argument x was not valid" etc.?)

Answer 1

You can check the bounds of an array in C++, std::vector::at does this automatically.

This doesn't make your app crash proof, you are still allowed to deliberately shoot yourself in the foot but nothing in C++ forces you to pull the trigger.

Answer 2

No. Even assuming your code is bug free. For one, I have looked at many a crash reports automatically submitted and I can assure you that the quality of the hardware out there is much bellow what most developers expect. Bit flips are all too common on commodity machines and cause random AVs. And, even if you are prepared to handle access violations, there are certain exceptions that the OS has no choice but to terminate the process, for example failure to commit a stack guard page.

Answer 3

By crash I primarily mean forceful termination by the OS upon memory access violation, due to invalid input passed by the user (like an abnormally short junk data).

This is what usually happens. If you access some invalid memory usually OS aborts your program.

However the question what is invalid memory... You may freely fill with garbage all the memory in heap and stack and this is valid from OS point of view, it would not be valid from your point of view as you created garbage.

Basically - you need to check the input data carefully and relay on this. No OS would do this for you.

If you check your input data carefully you would likely to manage the data ok.

Answer 4

I primarily mean forceful termination by the OS upon memory access violation, due to invalid input passed by the user

Not sure who "the user" is.

You can write programs that won't crash due to invalid end-user input. On some systems, you can be forcefully terminated due to using too much memory (or because some other program is using too much memory). And as Remus says, there is no language which can fully protect you against hardware failures. But those things depend on factors other than the bytes of data provided by the user.

What you can't easily do in C++ is prove that your program won't crash due to invalid input, or go wrong in even worse ways, creating serious security flaws. So sometimes[*] you think that your code is safe against any input, but it turns out not to be. Your developer might mean this.

If your code is a function that takes for example a pointer to the image data, then there's nothing to stop the caller passing you some invalid pointer value:

char *image_data = malloc(1);
free(image_data);
image_processing_function(image_data);

So the function on its own can't be "crash-proof", it requires that the rest of the program doesn't do anything to make it crash. Your developer also might mean this, so perhaps you should ask him to clarify.

Java deals with this specific issue by making it impossible to create an invalid reference - you don't get to manually free memory in Java, so in particular you can't retain a reference to it after doing so. It deals with a lot of other specific issues in other ways, so that the situations which are "undefined behavior" in C++, and might well cause a crash, will do something different in Java (probably throw an exception).

[*] let's face it: in practice, in large software projects, "often".

Answer 5

I think this is a case of C++ codes not being managed codes.

Java, C# codes are managed, that is they are effectively executed by an Interpreter which is able to perform bound checking and detect crash conditions.

With the case of C++, you need to perform bound and other checking yourself. However, you have the luxury of using Exception Handling, which will prevent crash during events beyond your control.

The bottom line is, C++ codes themselves are not crash proof, but a good design and development can make them to be so.

Answer 6

In general, you can't make a C++ API crash-proof, but there are techniques that can be used to make it more robust. Off the top of my head (and by no means exhaustive) for your particular example:

• Sanity check input data where possible
• Buffer limit checks in the data processing code
• Edge and corner case testing
• Fuzz testing
• Putting problem inputs in the unit test for regression avoidance

Answer 7

If "crash proof" only mean that you want to ensure that you have enough information to investigate crash after it occurred solution can be simple. Most cases when debugging information is lost during crash resulted from corruption and/or loss of stack data due to illegal memory operation by code running in one of threads. If you have few places where you call library or SDK that you don't trust you can simply save the stack trace right before making call into that library at some memory location pointed to by global variable that will be included into partial or full memory dump generated by system when your application crashes. On windows such functionality provided by CrtDbg API.On Linux you can use backtrace API - just search doc on show_stackframe(). If you loose your stack information you can then instruct your debugger to use that location in memory as top of the stack after you loaded your dump file. Well it is not very simple after all, but if you haunted by memory dumps without any clue what happened it may help. Another trick often used in embedded applications is cycled memory buffer for detailed logging. Logging to the buffer is very cheap since it is never saved, but you can get idea on what happen milliseconds before crash by looking at content of the buffer in your memory dump after the crash.

Answer 8

Actually, using bounds checking makes your application more likely to crash!

This is good design because it means that if your program is working, it's that much more likely to be working /correctly/, rather than working incorrectly.

That said, a given application can't be made "crash proof", strictly speaking, until the Halting Problem has been solved. Good luck!