libgcrypt and patches again

[Christian Grothoff]

On Tuesday 11 October 2005 03:25, Nikos Mavrogiannopoulos wrote:
> On Tuesday 11 October 2005 12:06, Werner Koch wrote:
> > > implementation errors is a strange way to build security relevant
> > > software. Securely freeing and cleaning resources is usually an
> > > important part of cryptographic software solutions.
> >
> > Please understand that these are one time allocations. Consider them
> > part of the DSO loading process.
>
> I tend to agree with Dirk on that matter. If a program uses 10 shared
> libraries that do not deallocate their resources, checking for memory leaks
> in the program is a disaster.

I also agree with Dirk.  In particular I an thinking of problems that would 
occur if the library is loaded and unloaded repeatedly (dlopen/dlclose), 
causing the malloc'ed memory to live-on.  Now, Dirk's explicit shutdown-call 
might not be the best choice in this context, maybe a destructor / _fini_ / 
whatever that is automatically triggered by the linker (ideally paired with a 
matching constructor that does the allocation) would be the perfect solution 
in my opinion.

my 2 cents

Christian