[SDL] Re: SDL Digest, Vol 11, Issue 33

[Jeff]

On Tuesday 29 March 2005 07:57 pm, David Olsen wrote:
> This sounds very scary, indeed. What does one need to do in order to avoid
> such potential disaster? Refrain entirely from printf, etc.?
>
Ack, no! printf() is God's gift to debugging ;-) Your program has control 
over what arguments are sent to printf. The potential for exploits comes from 
user input (eg: scanf, strcpy, etc). Your program should check for possible 
buffer overflows, suspicious format specifiers in the input, etc. Simple 
example:

  if (strlen(source) >= BufferSize)
      error("Whoops! Input too big!");
  else
     strcpy(buffer, source);

scanf() and fscanf() should be avoided for other reasons also. Unless input 
is coming from a file with known format, it's better to write your own input 
parsing routines.

HTH,
Jeff