When getatomprop() is called, it invokes XGetWindowProperty() to
retrieve an Atom. If the property exists but has zero elements (length
0), Xlib returns Success and sets p to a valid, non-NULL memory address
containing a single null byte.
However, dl (that is, the number of items) is 0. dwm blindly casts p to
Atom* and dereferences it. While Xlib guarantees that p is safe to read
as a string (that is, it is null-terminated), it does _not_ guarantee it
is safe to read as an Atom (an unsigned long).
The Atom type is a typedef for unsigned long. Reading an Atom (which
thus will either likely be 4 or 8 bytes) from a 1-byte allocated buffer
results in a heap buffer overflow. Since property content is user
controlled, this allows any client to trigger an out of bounds read
simply by setting a property with format 32 and length 0.
An example client which reliably crashes dwm under ASAN: