This is a form of an uninitialized read bug; although safe it caused
panics. In short, transmit buffers received from the network stack
should be considered uninitialized (in practice they will often
contain previously transmitted packets or parts thereof). Wrapping
them with the only method we had (e.g. Ipv4Packet) treated the buffer
as if it contained a valid incoming packet, which can easily fail
with Error::Truncated.
This commit splits every `fn new(buffer: T) -> Result<Self, Error>`
method on a `Packet` into three smaller ones:
* `fn check_len(&self) -> Result<(), Error>`, purely a validator;
* `fn new(T) -> Self`, purely a wrapper;
* `fn new_checked(T) -> Result<Self, Error>`, a validating wrapper.
This makes it easy to process ingress packets (using `new_checked`),
egress packets (using `new`), and, if needed, maintain the invariants
at any point during packet construction (using `check_len`).
Fixes#17.
Before this commit, IP payload length was calculated by subtracting
the IP header length from the total underlying buffer length, which
fails if the underlying buffer has padding, e.g. like Ethernet
does.
whitequark
Egor Karavaev