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> Every string function is designed to keep going until it finds the NULL character, so if a hacker gets rid of the NULL character,

What sort of situation are you envisioning where a hacker can remove the sentinel (in the case of nul-termination) but not modify the length bytes (in the case of fat pointers)?

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A situation in which a string is manipulated with buggy code that can remove the sentinel, e.g. the program uses strncpy, there is a bug in how it uses it, the hacker exploits the bug.

By contrast it's pretty unlikely for buggy code to mess the length. Add an element? +1. Remove an element? -1. Number of elements larger than capacity? Allocate a new array. Not much room for error.

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