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Thu, 02 Aug 2007:

In the last episode of Unicode Fun, we met the non-trademark infringing xoferiF. But this time I bring you English from beyond the equator - do not attempt to adjust your screen.

¿ ʇı ǝsnqɐ ʇ,uɐɔ noʎ ɟı ǝpoɔıun sı unɟ ʇɐɥʍ 'llɐ ɹǝʇɟɐ

˙ƃuoɹʍ uǝǝɹɔs ǝɥʇ ʇɐ ƃuıʞool ǝɹ,noʎ sıɥʇ pɐǝɹ uɐɔ noʎ ɟı

In conclusion, unicode ftw.

--
A smile is but a frown;
Turned upside down.

posted at: 01:30 | path: /fun | permalink | Tags: , ,

Fri, 13 Oct 2006:

Found this in one of the mailing lists - but this is total fnuk. Please feel free to click on any of the following links - yahoo shit and google shit. Please take a look at your title bar of your browser to understand the true beauty of bi-directional font-rendering :)

I'm sure xoferiF wouldn't violate any trademarks by the Mozilla foundation.

--
Drawing on my fine command of language, I said nothing.

posted at: 05:30 | path: /fun | permalink | Tags: , ,

Thu, 25 May 2006:

I don't know if you are even aware of Chris Shiflett's latest injection bug. It was reported in Mysql 5.0 and suddenly every other DB engine writer realized that it was present in almost every one of those. Postgres even churned out an immediate release to fix this particular issue. The blind spot of the whole fiasco has been multibyte encodings whereas the add_slashes is not binary safe. I was lurking in one of the php developer channels listening to exactly how this could've been exploited and it sounded really serious.

So 0x955c is a single SJIS character, when locale is taken into account, it's just a single character. But when you ignore locale and treat it as latin-1 it looks like 0x95 followed by a backslash. So in the php land, instead of treating it as a single character, escapes the backslash giving you a two character string that looks like 0x955c \ . Now you've got a stray slash which can be used as part of a user supplied escape sequence to inject whatever you require into the query data.

After Sara had explained all that, we turned to the quick fixes. Now, let me introduce UTF-8. A closer inspection of the UTF-8 code table and rationale behind contains the following pearl of wisdom - "The remaining bytes in a multi-byte sequence have 10 as their two most significant bits". So if you were using UTF-8 everywhere to handle unicode, it is not possible for a multi-byte character to end with the ordinal value of \ (0x5c). So convert a string to UTF-8 before escaping the backslashes and you're safe from this bug. So practise safe hex and always use UTF-8.

But for me the whole bug had a more hilarious side to it. Yesterday, I got two php server admins to take down talks.php.net (cached). And the reason it was taken down was due to a set of security vulnerabilities in a set of examples attached to a presentation. Authored by, you guessed it, Chris Shiflett.

<g0pz>    Derick: but I want to know what exactly is bugging the system
<Derick>  the apache process don't want to die either
<Derick>  all are dead now
<Derick>  let's start again
<g0pz>    it was probably the one I had attached with gdb
<Derick>  atleast the site works again
<g0pz>    Derick: shall I kill it again ? :)
<Derick>  g0pz: you know how to?

<g0pz>    edink: http://talks.php.net/presentations/slides/shiflett/
<>        oscon2004/php-security/code/shared-filesystem.php?file=/etc/passwd
<g0pz>    I found this in the access_log !!!
<g0pz>    Derick: that script is very very scary
<g0pz>    *please* *please* take it offline ?

<edink>   bloody hell
<Derick>  i now wiped all *.php files in shiff's dir
<edink>   and he now works for omniti?
<Derick>  yeah :)
<g0pz>    well, I'd have just put a .htaccess Deny all there
<edink>   g0pz: rm -rf is more effenctive :)
<g0pz>    more permanent ? :)
<johann__>slides/acc_php/tmp_table.php - sql (union) injection
<edink>   g0pz: yeah, security risks like that need to be dealt with permanently
<g0pz>    edink: IMHO, he probably wrote up that demo during the lunch break 
<>        before his presentation
<edink>   but how did that bring the site down?
<Derick>  some loop i think
<Derick>  .htaccess is disabled
*   Sebastian .oO( And he is an security expert, right? )
<Derick>  i don't have the time to deal with this either
<edink>   yeah ;)
<Derick>  i'll just turn off talks for now so that somebody can fix it

Somehow it stuck me as ironic that a security expert's own code should help someone read out the /etc/passwd from a publically visible, high traffic server. As Bart Simpson put it - The ironing is delicious.

--
The function of the expert is not to be more right than other people,
but to be wrong for more sophisticated reasons.
                      --  Dr. David Butler

posted at: 03:22 | path: /php | permalink | Tags: , ,