Synopsis

Possible dereference of an uninitialized or NULL pointer.

Enabled by default

No

Severity/Certainty

Low/High

Full description

On some execution paths, an uninitialized pointer value is dereferenced. This might cause memory corruption or an application crash. Pointer values must be initialized on all execution paths that result in a dereference. This check is identical to MISRAC2012-Rule-9.1_a, CERT-EXP33-C_c.

Coding standards

Code examples

The following code example fails the check and will give a warning:

void example(void) {
  int *p;
  *p = 4;  //p is uninitialized
}

The following code example passes the check and will not give a warning about this issue:

void example(void) {
  int *p,a;
  p = &a;
  *p = 4;  //OK - p holds a valid address
}