[openssl-users] Initialising OpenSSL more than once - how do we handle this?

[Matt Caswell]

On 30/07/18 19:08, Marty G wrote:
> On 07/30/2018 01:27 PM, Salz, Rich via openssl-users wrote:
> 
>> > I never thought I'd see the day that someone would have to defend
>> not leaking memory in pivotal security code like openssl however
>>
>>  
>>
>> To be accurate, it was a couple of people saying that memory leaks *on
>> process exit* aren’t be a big deal.
>>
>>  
>>
>>
> Fair enough, but it is my understanding that some RTOSes do not
> necessarily dealloc all memory alloc'd by a proc on proc exit.  So why
> not just have a rule "don't litter" instead of having complicated rules
> of when it is "probably ok to litter"?  Exploits nearly always leverage
> something programmers didn't anticipate or happens in a layer they are
> relying on but not directly coding so it seems fairly clear that the
> best path is to reduce those unknowns by explicitly cleaning up.  Taking
> the time to track down a memory leak rarely results in merely fixing a
> memory leak; usually another programming misstep is also found in
> conjunction with the leak.  Just my $0.02
> 
> 

To be clear I can only think of one leak that we have at process exit
(well technically its two instances of the same thing). And that leak is
not the result of a *mistake*. It is a deliberate design decision to
workaround around a problem on some platforms (i.e. anything that isn't
Windows, Linux or Solaris, IIRC). See:

https://github.com/openssl/openssl/blob/43a0f2733a943799060ea275516fcce00d89eb38/crypto/init.c#L145-L168

https://github.com/openssl/openssl/blob/43a0f2733a943799060ea275516fcce00d89eb38/crypto/init.c#L720-L739


Any other leaks should hopefully be being caught by our mem leak testing.

Matt