libhdf5 walks a local heap's free list when it loads the heap's data and
refuses the heap ("bad heap free list") when a free block starts or ends
outside the data segment, or links to offset 0. We never looked at the
free list, so a damaged old-style group listed names read from the broken
heap: once the user block of cve-2021-36977.h5 was applied, its root
listed eight garbage names where libhdf5 fails.
LocalHeap::validate_free_list (new) mirrors H5HL__fl_deserialize, with a
cycle bound, and accepts H5HL_FREE_NULL (1) or an all-ones head as the
end of the list. Like libhdf5 it runs when the first name is needed, not
on parse, so an empty group with a damaged heap still lists as empty
(cve-2018-13871.h5, cve-2024-29166.h5, gh-4431-poc-03.h5 keep matching
h5py).
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 (1M context) <[email protected]>
Group::datasets()/groups() (and the Mmap/Lazy handles) listed only hard
links, so a soft link to a dataset or group was missing, and dataset(name)
/ group(name) on a group handle could not open one. In old-style (symbol
table) groups a soft link's entry has no object header address, and the
listing failed outright trying to parse one.
The three facade handles each had their own copy of the child-listing
code; they now share group_v2::resolve_group_children, which returns hard
links plus soft links resolved to their targets (relative targets from
the group holding the link, via the new resolve_path_from). A dangling or
cyclic soft link, an external link and a user-defined link are left out —
h5py lists their names but cannot open them. Any other error met while
resolving is returned, not hidden.
Path resolution now walks a relative soft link's target from the group
holding it instead of rebuilding the path from the root (same result,
one less re-walk), and ignores "." components.
Regression test: soft_links_are_listed_as_their_targets (h5py writes
absolute, relative, group, dangling, cyclic and external links with
libver latest and earliest; listings compared with h5py for File,
MmapFile and LazyFile).
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 (1M context) <[email protected]>
- Path resolution follows soft links in both old-style (symbol table, cache
type 2) and new-style (compact and dense Link message) groups: absolute and
relative targets, links to groups, links through links, with a depth limit
so a link cycle is NestingDepthExceeded rather than a hang. A dangling link
reports the target it could not find. Previously every soft link was
PathNotFound.
- An external link is FormatError::ExternalLinkUnsupported { filename,
object_path } instead of a misleading PathNotFound.
- Message 0x0007 (External Data Files) is now a known MessageType, and a
dataset carrying it is FormatError::ExternalDataFilesUnsupported. Such a
dataset has no data address in this file, so it would otherwise be read as
"never written" and answered with fill values — wrong data, no error.
- Dense link iteration is shared between hard-link listing and the new
symbolic-link lookup; entry listing behaviour is unchanged.
- h5py interop test for both libver settings.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5.1 <[email protected]>
osobh