From: Jarkko Hietaniemi Date: Mon, 12 Nov 2001 13:11:55 +0000 (+0000) Subject: Add a note about the dangers of bad UTF-8. X-Git-Url: http://git.shadowcat.co.uk/gitweb/gitweb.cgi?a=commitdiff_plain;h=bf0fa0b28861f64af680a3c19765ac8a24e4f2bd;p=p5sagit%2Fp5-mst-13.2.git Add a note about the dangers of bad UTF-8. p4raw-id: //depot/perl@12953 --- diff --git a/pod/perlunicode.pod b/pod/perlunicode.pod index 2c9b078..277238e 100644 --- a/pod/perlunicode.pod +++ b/pod/perlunicode.pod @@ -742,6 +742,18 @@ is not extensible beyond 0xFFFF, because it does not use surrogates. A seven-bit safe (non-eight-bit) encoding, useful if the transport/storage is not eight-bit safe. Defined by RFC 2152. +=head2 Security Implications of Malformed UTF-8 + +Unfortunately, the specification of UTF-8 leaves some room for +interpretation of how many bytes of encoded output one should generate +from one input Unicode character. Strictly speaking, one is supposed +to always generate the shortest possible sequence of UTF-8 bytes, +because otherwise there is potential for input buffer overflow at the +receiving end of a UTF-8 connection. Perl always generates the shortest +length UTF-8, and with warnings on (C<-w> or C) Perl will +warn about non-shortest length UTF-8 (and other malformations, too, +such as the surrogates, which are not real character code points.) + =head2 Unicode in Perl on EBCDIC The way Unicode is handled on EBCDIC platforms is still rather