Segmentation faults are referred to as segfault, access violation or bus error. During run time if the process tries to access the memory outside its allocated space, the segmentation fault occurs. Each program (process) has access to certain portion of memory (user space or program space). The debugger can be used in combination with valgrind like utility to detect and eliminate the source of segmentation faults. The “stack smashed” message in the standard error stream is not even present on all platforms, and it can take lots and lots of time to figure out what happened, especially if you are running a third-party native library with no source code.Code debugging is the process of detecting and eliminating compiler, runtime, and logical errors in the code. I hope the post saves someone an all-nighter or two when facing abrupt JVM death without even a crash log. Why the abortion is done without a more detailed error log is a different question and outside the scope of this post. So the JVM adds guard values to the memory, and if these values are mangled after the native method finishes, terminates the application immediately. Going back to the allegedly safe Java world, such a buffer overflow may corrupt internal JVM structures, or even enable whoever it was that supplied the string to execute arbitrary code. While in this example using snprintf and enabling sanitization will definitely help, the error may easily be much more subtle than that and not caught automatically.
#Stack smashing detected mobaxterm code
In some cases the code might complete seemingly fine, but in some cases you can encounter buffer overflows. The results of running such code can become completely unpredictable. When the code is compiled without the sanitization in place, as in the following example, gcc -fno-stack-protector CheckSumCalculator.c -o CheckSumCalculator.so Having compiled the code with the stack protector in place, the implementations of either the runtime library or the OS may detect this situation in some conditions and terminate the program to prevent unexpected behavior. The available safety nets will vary significantly from compiler to compiler, and even between different versions of the same compiler, but here’s an example: gcc -fstack-protector CheckSumCalculator.c -o CheckSumCalculator.so Other than using the much safer snprintf that takes buffer length and does not write past that, you can also ask the compiler to add stack protectors, or memory sanitization to the compiled code. This will indeed result in stack smashing and opens doors for potential hacks or just leaving the application to an unpredictable state.įor C-developers, the underlying stack protector mechanism is well-known, but for Java developers, it might need a bit more explanation. With longer inputs the remaining characters will be written past its end. Sprintf(dst_filename, "%s.digested", src_filename) įrom the above it is clear that the buffer can only hold a fixed number characters. The underlying problem is not too complex and is probably immediately visible in the C code: char dst_filename
#Stack smashing detected mobaxterm mac os
You should be aware of the fact that I only tested the examples on Linux and Mac OS X, and it might behave differently on Windows. Instead, the JVM is crashed without so much as a crash log. So the native method finished its execution just fine, but the control was not returned to Java. *** stack smashing detected ***: java terminated The not-so straightforward part is exposed when you discover yourself staring at the output with a slightly different (longer) filename used for input: $ java -jar build/libs/checksum.jar 123456789012.txt Got checksum from native method: 1804289383 $ java -jar build/libs/checksum.jar 123.txtĮxiting native method with checksum: 1804289383 You would just need to clone the repository and launch it similar to the following example: $. The code is simple and straightforward and so is running it. To achieve Awesome Performance (TM), I decided to implement the checksum calculation part using native implementation. It consists of a simple Java class, calculating checksums for files. To walk you through the experience, I have created a small test case. Or in more detail, how using native methods can result in JVM crashing silently without any reasonable traces in log files. This post is about a recent experience with native methods. I am also sure that the surprise has later vanished over the years with coming to understand how the JVM handles calls to native implementations via JNI.
I bet every Java developer has been surprised at some point in the beginning of their career when they first encounter native methods in Java code.