V1086. Call of the 'Foo' function will lead to buffer underflow.

The analyzer has detected a potential error related to filling, copying or comparing memory buffers. The error can lead to buffer underflow.

This is a common type of errors caused, for example, by typos or inattention. The error can lead to incomplete data clearing and as a result, to using uninitialized or damaged memory. Although the program can run without problems for a long time. That's the main trouble of such errors.

Let's look at two examples from the real applications.

Example N1:

MD5Context *ctx;
....
memset(ctx, 0, sizeof(ctx));

Here, zeros do not fill the entire structure, but only part of it, because of a typo. The error is that the pointer's size is calculated, not the 'MD5Context' structure's size. The correct code variant is as follows:

MD5Context *ctx;
....
memset(ctx, 0, sizeof(*ctx));

Example N2:

#define CONT_MAP_MAX 50
int _iContMap[CONT_MAP_MAX];
memset(_iContMap, -1, CONT_MAP_MAX);

In this example, the size of the buffer is specified incorrectly. The correct code variant is:

#define CONT_MAP_MAX 50
int _iContMap[CONT_MAP_MAX];
memset(_iContMap, -1, CONT_MAP_MAX * sizeof(int));

Older versions compatibility

Previously this diagnostic rule was a part of another diagnostic —V512. For backward compatibility, we still provide the option to disable this diagnostic with a special comment:

//-V512_UNDERFLOW_OFF

You can add this comment into the header file, included into all the other files. For instance, it can be the "stdafx.h" file. If you add this comment into the "*.cpp" file, it will affect only this particular file.

This diagnostic is classified as: