coding style - Should you always use 'int' for numbers in C, even if they are non-negative?

Question

I always use unsigned int for values that should never be negative. But today I noticed this situation in my code:

void CreateRequestHeader( unsigned bitsAvailable, unsigned mandatoryDataSize, 
    unsigned optionalDataSize )
{
    If ( bitsAvailable – mandatoryDataSize >= optionalDataSize ) {
        // Optional data fits, so add it to the header.
    }

    // BUG! The above includes the optional part even if
    // mandatoryDataSize > bitsAvailable.
}

Should I start using int instead of unsigned int for numbers, even if they can't be negative?

Answer 1

One thing that hasn't been mentioned is that interchanging signed/unsigned numbers can lead to security bugs. This is a big issue, since many of the functions in the standard C-library take/return unsigned numbers (fread, memcpy, malloc etc. all take size_t parameters)

For instance, take the following innocuous example (from real code):

//Copy a user-defined structure into a buffer and process it
char* processNext(char* data, short length)
{
    char buffer[512];
    if (length <= 512) {
        memcpy(buffer, data, length);
        process(buffer);
        return data + length;
    } else {
        return -1;
    }
}

Looks harmless, right? The problem is that length is signed, but is converted to unsigned when passed to memcpy. Thus setting length to SHRT_MIN will validate the <= 512 test, but cause memcpy to copy more than 512 bytes to the buffer - this allows an attacker to overwrite the function return address on the stack and (after a bit of work) take over your computer!

You may naively be saying, "It's so obvious that length needs to be size_t or checked to be >= 0, I could never make that mistake". Except, I guarantee that if you've ever written anything non-trivial, you have. So have the authors of Windows, Linux, BSD, Solaris, Firefox, OpenSSL, Safari, MS Paint, Internet Explorer, Google Picasa, Opera, Flash, Open Office, Subversion, Apache, Python, PHP, Pidgin, Gimp, ... on and on and on ... - and these are all bright people whose job is knowing security.

In short, always use size_t for sizes.

Man, programming is hard.