Full Disclosure mailing list archives
noise about full-width encoding bypass?
From: "Brian Eaton" <eaton.lists () gmail com>
Date: Mon, 21 May 2007 10:22:21 -0400
Has anyone had a look at the full-width unicode encoding trick discussed here? http://www.kb.cert.org/vuls/id/739224 AFAICT, this technique could be useful for a homograph attack. I don't think it's useful for much else. However, a few vendors have reacted already, so I may be missing something important. Here's why I think the attack is mostly harmless: Let's say an attacker wants to use this technique to hide a SQL injection attack. They decide to use a full-width encoding for single quote, 0xff 0x07. They successfully bypass the IDS, because the IDS is only scanning for normal single quotes. (You can see the encodings and their graphical representation here: http://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/UFF00.pdf) If the SQL engine is processing queries in Unicode, then 0xff 0x07 will be treated as a normal unicode character, not a single quote. The sequence 0xff 0x07 is not equivalent to 0x27, the real single quote value. No SQL injection occurs. If the SQL engine is processing queries in UTF-8, then 0xff 0x07 will be converted from Unicode to UTF-8: 0xef 0xbc 0x87. Again, the engine does not recognize 0xef 0xbc 0x87 as equivalent to 0x27. If the SQL engine is processing queries in ASCII or ISO-8859-1, the conversion from unicode to the code page used by the engine will fail. Either the engine will give up on the query, or it might substitute a question mark (?) for the unconvertible character. To summarize: I think half-width and full-width unicode characters are characters that happen to have the same graphical representation as other characters, but don't carry any special significance outside of that graphical representation. The graphical representation can be important in homograph attacks, but otherwise I don't see this technique as particularly useful to an attacker. Any comments on what I may have missed? Regards, Brian _______________________________________________ Full-Disclosure - We believe in it. Charter: http://lists.grok.org.uk/full-disclosure-charter.html Hosted and sponsored by Secunia - http://secunia.com/
Current thread:
- noise about full-width encoding bypass? Brian Eaton (May 21)
- Re: noise about full-width encoding bypass? 3APA3A (May 21)
- Re: noise about full-width encoding bypass? Brian Eaton (May 21)
- Re: noise about full-width encoding bypass? 3APA3A (May 22)
- Re: noise about full-width encoding bypass? Brian Eaton (May 21)
- Re: noise about full-width encoding bypass? Brian Eaton (May 21)
- Re: noise about full-width encoding bypass? ascii (May 21)
- Re: noise about full-width encoding bypass? Brian Eaton (May 21)
- Re: noise about full-width encoding bypass? Steven Adair (May 21)
- Re: noise about full-width encoding bypass? Valdis . Kletnieks (May 21)
- Re: noise about full-width encoding bypass? 3APA3A (May 22)
- Re: noise about full-width encoding bypass? ascii (May 21)
- Re: [WEB SECURITY] Re: noise about full-width encoding bypass? Chris Weber (May 21)
- Re: noise about full-width encoding bypass? 3APA3A (May 21)