Remove reference to the base64 encoding.

This commit is contained in:
Antoine Pitrou 2011-12-05 01:22:03 +01:00
commit 9b1ec97867
1 changed files with 5 additions and 22 deletions

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@ -552,7 +552,6 @@ should only be used on systems where undecodable file names can be present,
i.e. Unix systems.
Tips for Writing Unicode-aware Programs
---------------------------------------
@ -572,28 +571,12 @@ you do e.g. ``str + bytes``, a :exc:`TypeError` is raised for this expression.
When using data coming from a web browser or some other untrusted source, a
common technique is to check for illegal characters in a string before using the
string in a generated command line or storing it in a database. If you're doing
this, be careful to check the string once it's in the form that will be used or
stored; it's possible for encodings to be used to disguise characters. This is
especially true if the input data also specifies the encoding; many encodings
leave the commonly checked-for characters alone, but Python includes some
encodings such as ``'base64'`` that modify every single character.
this, be careful to check the decoded string, not the encoded bytes data;
some encodings may have interesting properties, such as not being bijective
or not being fully ASCII-compatible. This is especially true if the input
data also specifies the encoding, since the attacker can then choose a
clever way to hide malicious text in the encoded bytestream.
For example, let's say you have a content management system that takes a Unicode
filename, and you want to disallow paths with a '/' character. You might write
this code::
def read_file(filename, encoding):
if '/' in filename:
raise ValueError("'/' not allowed in filenames")
unicode_name = filename.decode(encoding)
with open(unicode_name, 'r') as f:
# ... return contents of file ...
However, if an attacker could specify the ``'base64'`` encoding, they could pass
``'L2V0Yy9wYXNzd2Q='``, which is the base-64 encoded form of the string
``'/etc/passwd'``, to read a system file. The above code looks for ``'/'``
characters in the encoded form and misses the dangerous character in the
resulting decoded form.
References
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