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Re: Fwd: Non-upstream patches for bash


From: Chet Ramey <chet.ramey () case edu>
Date: Sun, 19 Oct 2014 17:34:14 -0400

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On 9/29/14 11:44 AM, cve-assign () mitre org wrote:
the parser is not locale-agnostic. Here's an example how it can be
exploited:
http://bugs.python.org/issue22187

That's not actually an exploit, or even a bug.

The discussion in Issue22187 is about changing code in Python 2.x to
work around this. However, is it useful to assign one new
CVE-2014-#### ID for Bash, on the expectation that Bash was intended
to recognize valid characters in zh_CN.GBK, but instead is identifying
part of a two-byte character as a \ character, and this has security
implications for products that attempt to do otherwise-correct quoting
of untrusted strings for use in sh commands?

This is exactly the opposite of what is happening.  The test in the link
(message 226439) shows that bash and ksh are properly reading valid
multibyte characters in the input and not treating backslashes that are the
second byte of a multibyte character as escape characters.  The other
shells, presumably not multibyte-character-aware at all, incorrectly allow
that backslash to escape the closing double quote.

Posix is very careful to specify that the shell reads characters, and
uses characters when deciding how to tokenize the input, instead of bytes.
If those characters are multibyte, the shell is expected to read multiple
bytes.  Are you proposing that a multibyte character whose second byte
happens to be a `|' should start a pipeline?

Chet
- -- 
``The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne.'' - Chaucer
                 ``Ars longa, vita brevis'' - Hippocrates
Chet Ramey, ITS, CWRU    chet () case edu    http://cnswww.cns.cwru.edu/~chet/
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