• 
      

    Update the Trojan Source scanner for Unicode confusables/homoglyphs.

    Review Request #11908 — Created Jan. 6, 2022 and submitted — Latest diff uploaded

    Information

    Review Board
    release-5.0.x

    Reviewers

    The Trojan Source scanner now looks for certain Unicode characters that
    appear as standard latin1 characters, like A-Z, a-z, 0-9, etc. These can
    be used by a malicious developer to try to sneak in logic that appears
    to define or make use of a function, class, variable, etc. with one
    name, while actually using a completely different name.

    This is CVE-2021-42694.

    This sort of scanning must be done carefully. There are a lot of
    perfectly valid Unicode characters out there, and we don't want to check
    them all, assume they're all nefarious.

    What we instead do is check only confusables that meet the following
    criteria:

    1. Has a codepoint >= 128 (avoiding issues with, say, "1" vs" "l").
    2. Can be confused with a COMMON or LATIN Unicode character (ones most
      likely to be legitimately used in function names or other code)
    3. Is not itself a COMMON or LATIN Unicode character.

    To generate the mapping, we have a new
    ./contrib/internal/build-confusables.py file, which will pull down the
    latest datasets from unicode.org and generate a resulting
    reviewboard/codesafety/_unicode_confusables.py file.

    This is not perfect. People may find that some comments or strings
    trigger a warning. Ideally, we'd be able to selectively apply these
    tests depending on where it appears, but we're not in a position to do
    that yet. Still, most of these should probably not be hit often in
    practice.

    Possible areas of future expansion would be to allow these if beside
    other characters from the same script that are not themselves
    confusables. This could be attempted if we get feedback later stating
    that too many false-positives are being generated.

    There is one major caveat to this implementation: it largely requires
    wide Unicode character support, so that surrogate pairs appear as one
    character/codepoint and not multiple.

    This is always the case on Python 3. For Python 2, it depends on how
    CPython was compiled. If wide support is not enabled, certain characters
    cannot be found.

    Unit tests pass on Python 2 (without wide support) and Python 3.

    Tested with all the test code sets provided on
    https://github.com/nickboucher/trojan-source/


    Commits

    Files