MSC10-A Character Encoding - UTF8 Related Issues

UTF-8 is a variable-width encoding for Unicode. UTF-8 uses one to four bytes per character, depending on the Unicode symbol. UTF-8 has the following properties.

• The classical US-ASCII characters (0 to 0x7f) encode as themselves, so files and strings that are encoded with ASCII values have the same encoding under both ASCII and UTF-8.
• All UCS characters beyond (0x7f) are encoded as a multibyte sequence consisting only of bytes in the range of 0x80 to 0xfd. This means that no ASCII byte can appear as part of another character.
• It's easy to convert between UTF-8 and UCS-2 and UCS-4 fixed-width representations of characters.
• The lexicographic sorting order of UCS-4 strings is preserved.
• All possible 2^31 UCS codes can be encoded using UTF-8

Generally, all programs should perform checks for any UTF-8 data for UTF-8 legality before performing other checks. The table below listed all Legal UTF-8 Sequences.

Security Related Issues

Only Accept the "shortest" form 

The UTF-8 encoding scheme is fairly simple, but there are a few clarifications that are important for security reasons. One of the most important ones is the requirement that only the "shortest" form of UTF-8 should be permitted. Naive decoder may accept encoding that are longer than necessary, this means that potentially dangerous input could be represented multiple ways, and this will defeat the security checking for dangerous inputs. For example:

1. Process A perfoms security checks, but does not check for non-shortest UTF-8 forms.
2. Process B accepts the byte sequence from process A, and transform it into UTF-16 while interpreting possible non-shortest forms.
3. The UTF-16 text may then contain characters that should have been filtered out by process A, and could potentially be dangerous.

This non-"shortest" UTF-8 forms have been used to bypass security validations in high profile products including Microsoft's IIS web server.

Handling Invalid Inputs

Upon receiving a invalid form of UTF-8, there is not a uniformly defined responds/behavior define by the standard for a UTF-8 decoder. In general, there are several ways that a UTF-8 may behave in the event of an invalid byte sequence:

1. Insert a replacement character (e.g. "?" the wild card character)
2. Ignore the bytes.
3. Interpret the bytes according to a different character encoding (often the ISO-8859-1 character map)
4. Not notice and decode as if the bytes were some similar bit of UTF-8.
5. Stop decoding and report an error

The following function from Viega 03 will detect illegal character sequences in a string. It returns 1 if the string is comprised only of legitimate sequences, else it returns 0:

int spc_utf8_isvalid(const unsigned char *input) {
  int nb;
  const unsigned char *c = input;
  
  for (c = input;  *c;  c += (nb + 1)) {
    if (!(*c & 0x80)) nb = 0;
    else if ((*c & 0xc0) =  = 0x80) return 0;
    else if ((*c & 0xe0) =  = 0xc0) nb = 1;
    else if ((*c & 0xf0) =  = 0xe0) nb = 2;
    else if ((*c & 0xf8) =  = 0xf0) nb = 3;
    else if ((*c & 0xfc) =  = 0xf8) nb = 4;
    else if ((*c & 0xfe) =  = 0xfc) nb = 5;
    while (nb-- > 0)
      if ((*(c + nb) & 0xc0) != 0x80) return 0;
  } 
  return 1;
}

Broken Surrogates

The most recent requirement for UTF-8 encoding is that encoding of individual or out of order surrogate halves should not be permitted. Broken surrogates are illegal in Unicode, so they introduce ambiguity when they appear in Unicode data. Again they could be used to create strings that appeared similar but were not really similar, particularly when applications ignore the bad data. Broken surrogates could be signs of bad data transmission. They could also indicate internal bugs in application or intentional efforts to find security problems.

Another requirement is that encoding of individual or out of order surrogate halves should not be permitted.

Reference

• The RFC describes the problem this way: Implementers of UTF-8 need to consider the security aspects of how they handle illegal UTF-8 sequences. It is conceivable that in some circumstances an attacker would be able to exploit an incautious UTF-8 parser by sending it an octet (byte) sequence that is not permitted by the UTF-8 syntax. A particularly subtle form of this attack could be carried out against a parser which which performs security-critical validity checks against the UTF-8 encoded form of its input, but interprets certain illegal octet sequences as a character. For example, a parser might prohibit the NUL character when encoded as single-octet sequence 00, but allow the illegal two-octet sequence C0 80 (illegal because it's longer than necessary) and interpret it as a NUL character (00). Another example might be a parser which prohibits the octet sequence 2F 2E 2E 2F ("/../"), yet permits the illegal octet sequence 2F c) AE 2E 2F.

[[Kuhn 06]] UTF-8 and Unicode FAQ for Unix/Linux
[[Viega 03]] Section 3.12. "Detecting Illegal UTF-8 Characters"
[[Wheeler 06]] Secure Programming for Linux and Unix HOWTO
[[Yergeau 98]] RFC 2279 - UTF-8, a transformation format of ISO 10646