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Unicode cannot be secure---B. Schneier

Unicode cannot be secure---B. Schneier

Posted Feb 19, 2004 15:28 UTC (Thu) by Max.Hyre (subscriber, #1054)
In reply to: Unicode bugs by simonl
Parent article: The kernel and character set encodings

Well, that should get their attention. :-) The exact wording was ``Unicode is just too complex to ever be secure.''

In his July 2000 Crypto-gram article on Unicode, Schneier points up the failures we've had dealing with ASCII control characters, escape sequences, different semantics at different levels of the application (think writing a bash command to grep for a particular grep regular expression), and concludes that with Unicode it's not merely hard, it's effectively impossible.

I don't know enough about Unicode to argue the details, but it certainly made me sit up and take notice.


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