Integer overflow: Difference between revisions

Revision as of 14:18, 18 April 2022

Revision as of 21:23, 18 April 2022

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An overflow condition may give results leading to unintended behavior. In particular, if the possibility has not been anticipated, overflow can compromise a program's reliability and [[software security|security]].

For some applications, such as timers and clocks, wrapping on overflow can be desirable. The [[C (programming language)|C11]] standard states that for unsigned integers, modulo wrapping is the defined behavior and the term overflow never applies: "a computation involving unsigned operands can never overflow."<ref name="auto">{{cite web |url=https://webstore.ansi.org/RecordDetail.aspx?sku=ISO/IEC+9899:2011&msclkid=2f0af3a2b5ca143c9285a9f8e8f6b3e1 |title=ISO/IEC 9899:2011 Information technology - Programming languages - C |author=ISO staff |website=ANSI.org}}</ref>

On some processors like [[graphics processing unit]]s (GPUs) and [[digital signal processor]]s (DSPs) which support [[saturation arithmetic]], overflowed results would be "clamped", i.e. set to the minimum or the maximum value in the representable range, rather than wrapped around.

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*[http://www.cs.utah.edu/~regehr/papers/tosem15.pdf Understanding Integer Overflow in C/C++]

*[https://www.allaboutcircuits.com/textbook/digital/chpt-2/binary-overflow/ Binary Overflow – Binary Arithmetic]

*[https://webstore.ansi.org/RecordDetail.aspx?sku=ISO%2FIEC%209899:2011&msclkid=2f0af3a2b5ca143c9285a9f8e8f6b3e1 ISO C11 Standard]

[[Category:Software bugs]]