[Cryptography] The GOTO Squirrel! [was GOTO Considered Harmful]

[Patrick Chkoreff]

Eric Young wrote, On 03/03/2014 07:53 AM:

> The way I now handle errors in my bignum library is to have an error
> flag in the context that is always passed to functions.  It is checked
> on function entry, if there is an error, this is returned, else do the
> function.
> 
> So
> 
> if ((ret = bn_mul(bn_ctx,r,a,b)) != 0) goto err;
> if ((ret = bn_add(bn_ctx,r,r,c)) != 0) goto err;
> err:
> /* cleanup */
> return(ret);
> 
> becomes
> 
> bn_mul(bn_ctx,r,a,b);
> bn_add(bn_ctx,r,r,c);
> ret = bn_ctx->error;
> /* cleanup */
> return(ret);


You know, I was thinking about this error-code chaining technique, and
how it enables writing straight-line code, in light of the
SSLVerifySignedServerKeyExchange function.  (Source code at
http://fexl.com/goto-considered-harmful).

It occurred to me that I don't see how the hashOut value influences any
of the parameters passed to sslRawVerify.  I suppose there's some
connection via pointer aliasing, but I don't immediately see it.

What am I missing here?


-- Patrick