Re: JFS default behavior (was: UTF-8 in file systems? xfs/extfs/etc.)

Jamie Lokier
2004-02-13T03:15:17Z

John Bradford wrote:
> in the real world don't you think that there will be a lot of
> decoders which decode the multi-byte sequence back, rather than
> report an error?

There will be decoders which convert ASCII "a" to "A" too. We can't
fix broken code; at least we can make it clear to anyone writing a
decoder what is acceptable, and that being "liberal" in what's decoded
is not acceptable and considered a security flaw.

An app author only writes the UTF-8 decoder once; it isn't at all hard
to convert non-minimal forms to the replacement char U+FFFD.
(Although that could be a security hole in some cases, it's much
better than allowing non-zero characters to decoder to NUL or "/" or
"."). Rejecting a non-minimal form is often hard, because the UTF-8
decoder is often used in a place which cannot flag errors.

> Imagine you have two files, with the following filename bytes:
>
> 11000001 10000001 00000000
> 01000001 00000000
>
> ..and a _real world_ application, which is not necessarily completely
> UTF-8 conformant, tries to open the file with filename 'A'. Which one
> is it going to open?

The one which "ls" and other programs show as "A".
The other one will typically show as "?" or a diamond or something.

> I don't think that the issue with combining characters is likely to be
> an issue, I only mentioned it as an example. As you pointed out a
> single accented character, and a two character combination are
> distinct, and converting the combination to the corresponding single
> character in a filename would definitely be wrong, in my opinion.
> However, that doesn't mean that software won't do it.

Indeed some software will do it, and worse than that: they may look
the same in an editor or file selector. (See recent problems with
misleading URLs for why that sort of thing can be a security hole).

The combining char problem is similar to case folding: some
filesystems and programs treat "a" and "A" as equivalent too. If the
kernel had an encoding converter, and the filesystem stored iso-8859-1
while userspace was presented with utf-8, it is likely that several
Unicode characters would be mapped to "a", causing similar problems to
automatic case folding in filesystems.

In other words, there is no clear solution to this problem.

-- Jamie