Stacks of Shame - an epitaph of bad coding...

SHSF #2

mu-b — Tue, 12 Jun 2007 09:55:37 +0000

Product: MailEnable IMAP (Version 2.37/8)
Function/Size: 0×40FC59, 251,040-bytes (245.15 KB).
Here we have a prime example, and the original motivation for the creation of stacksofshame.com. Upon discovering this “gem” a few months ago, I can honestly say I almost cried. For the future of humanity is bleak if we continue to recklessly waste resources in such a slap hazard manner as the developers of MailEnable.

To put this example into context, consider that 251,040-bytes is 3.83 times more memory than that available in the Commodore C64. Furthermore, people are actually asked to pay for this cruft, is it any wonder memory requirements on software is increasing at an alarming rate? quite how allocating 251,040-bytes of local stack space for a SINGLE STACK FRAME can be accepted is beyond my comprehension.

SHSF #1: the first of many…

mu-b — Mon, 11 Jun 2007 14:08:53 +0000

Here we have the first of a recurrence for stacksofshame.com, that is, a truly shameful stack-frame.

Product: BusinessMail POP3 (Version 4.70).
Function/Size: 0×406DF3, 12,256-bytes (11.04 KB).
Quite why the author thought he should allocate 12,256-bytes of stack space is truly beyond me, has he never heard of malloc()?.

Stacksofshame.com - a blog of bad coding practice

mu-b — Sun, 10 Jun 2007 20:24:20 +0000

As you might have guessed, this is the first post to my blog. I recently decided that stacksofshame.com would be almost entirely devoted to blogging the many terrible, awful and god damn shameful code fragments encountered during source code auditing and/or reverse engineering both commercial and open source software.

If your lucky, you might happen upon a few 0day’s from time to time!!…