DynamoDB limits of all expressions (ConditionExpression, UpdateExpression,
ProjectionExpression, FilterExpression, KeyConditionExpression) to just
4096 bytes. Until now, Alternator did not enforce this limit, and we had
an xfailing test showing this.
But it turns out that not enforcing this limit can be dangerous: The user
can pass arbitrarily-long and arbitrarily nested expressions, such as:
a<b and (a<b and (a<b and (a<b and (a<b and (a<b and (...))))))
or
(((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((
and those can cause recursive algorithms in Alternator's parser and
later when applying expressions to recurse very deeply, overflow the
stack, and crash.
This patch includes new tests that demonstrate how Scylla crashes during
parsing before enforcing the 4096-byte length limit on expressions.
The patch then enforces this length limit, and these tests stop crashing.
We also verify that deeply-nested expressions shorter than the 4096-byte
limit are apparently short enough for our recursion ability, and work
as expected.
Unforuntately, running these tests many times showed that the 4096-byte
limit is not low enough to avoid all crashes so this patch needs to do
more:
The parsers created by ANTLR are recursive, and there is no way to limit
the depth of their recursion (i.e., nothing like YACC's YYMAXDEPTH).
Very deep recursion can overflow the stack and crash Scylla. After we
limited the length of expression strings to 4096 bytes this was *almost*
enough to prevent stack overflows. But unfortunetely the tests revealed
that even limited to 4096 bytes, the expression can sometimes recurse
too deeply: Consider the expression "((((((....((((" with 4000 parentheses.
To realize this is a syntax error, the parser needs to do a recursive
call 4000 times. Or worse - because of other Antlr limitations (see rants
in comments in expressions.g) it's actually 12000 recursive calls, and
each of these calls have a pretty large frame. In some cases, this
overflows the stack.
The solution used in this patch is not pretty, but works. We add to rules
in alternator/expressions.g that recurse (there are two of those - "value"
and "boolean_expression") an integer "depth" parameter, which we increase
when the rule recurses. Moreover, we add a so-called predicate
"{depth<MAX_DEPTH}?" that stops the parsing when this limit is reached.
When the parsing is stopped, the user will see a special kind of parse
error, saying "expression nested too deeply".
With this last modification to expressions.g, the tests for deeply-nested but
still-below-4096-bytes expressions
(test_limits.py::test_deeply_nested_expression_*) would not fail sporadically
as they did without it.
While adding the "expression nested too deeply" case, I also made the
general syntax-error reporting in Alternator nicer: It no longer prints
the internal "expression_syntax_error" type name (an exception type will
only be printed if some sort of unexpected exception happens), and it
prints the character position where the syntax error (or too deep
nested expression) was recognized.
Fixes#14473
Signed-off-by: Nadav Har'El <nyh@scylladb.com>
Closes#14477
04e5082d52