Bug#400955: Time to step up to the plate... Bug 400747

Fabian Fagerholm fabbe at paniq.net
Wed Dec 6 17:50:37 CET 2006


> Henrique de Moraes Holschuh píše v Út 05. 12. 2006 v 20:48 -0200:
> > Also, currently sasl is (as you probably know) not being very forgiving of
> > clients doing extremely dumb things (aka sending CR/LF/CRLF in base64
> > strings), might that be the problem?

FYI:

On Wed, 06 Dec 2006 09:22:43 -0500, Ken Murchison wrote:
> Applications are supposed to be stripping any protocol junk off of
> the string and just pass naked base64.

(That's from the cyrus-sasl (upstream) mailing list:
http://asg.web.cmu.edu/archive/message.php?mailbox=archive.cyrus-sasl&msg=8216)

Currently cyrus-sasl2 includes a patch that allows trailing CR/LF/CRLF.
With etch in mind, we don't have time to track down and fix all packages
that supply junk among the base64 data, but we should definitely start
to hunt down all such cases. Unfortunately, for etch I think we're going
to have to "hide" this bug in other programs by including this patch.
After etch, dropping that patch in the unstable version is going to be
among the first things on my list...

In case someone is interested, the reason why some implementations
permit "junk" inside the base64 data is probably that the MIME standard
requires (RFC 2045, section 6.8) implementations to silently ignore
non-base64 characters, and split lines every 76 characters. The actual
base64 spec is defined in RFC 4648, in which section 3.3 explicitly
says: "Implementations MUST reject the encoded data if it contains
characters outside the base alphabet..." and goes on to allow an
exception for this: "...unless the specification referring to this
document explicitly states otherwise" (MIME being an example).

Cheers,
-- 
Fabian Fagerholm <fabbe at paniq.net>
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