Re: invalidly encoded strings - Mailing list pgsql-hackers

From Tatsuo Ishii
Subject Re: invalidly encoded strings
Date
Msg-id 20070911.122936.68059988.t-ishii@sraoss.co.jp
Whole thread Raw
In response to Re: invalidly encoded strings  (Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us>)
Responses Re: invalidly encoded strings
List pgsql-hackers
> Tatsuo Ishii <ishii@postgresql.org> writes:
> >> BTW, it strikes me that there is another hole that we need to plug in
> >> this area, and that's the convert() function.  Being able to create
> >> a value of type text that is not in the database encoding is simply
> >> broken.  Perhaps we could make it work on bytea instead (providing
> >> a cast from text to bytea but not vice versa), or maybe we should just
> >> forbid the whole thing if the database encoding isn't SQL_ASCII.
> 
> > Please don't do that. It will break an usefull use case of convert().
> 
> The reason we have a problem here is that we've been choosing
> convenience over safety in encoding-related issues.  I wonder if we must
> stoop to having a "strict_encoding_checks" GUC variable to satisfy
> everyone.

Please show me concrete examples how I could introduce a vulnerability
using this kind of convert() usage.

> > A user has a database encoded in UTF-8. He has English, French,
> > Chinese  and Japanese data in tables. To sort the tables in the
> > language order, he will do like this:
> 
> > SELECT * FROM japanese_table ORDER BY convert(japanese_text using utf8_to_euc_jp);
> 
> > Without using convert(), he will get random order of data.
> 
> I'd say that *with* convert() he will get a random order of data.  This
> is making a boatload of unsupportable assumptions about the locale and
> encoding of the surrounding database.  There are a lot of bad-encoding
> situations for which strcoll() simply breaks down completely and can't
> even deliver self-consistent answers.
> 
> It might work the way you are expecting if the database uses SQL_ASCII
> encoding and C locale --- and I'd be fine with allowing convert() only
> when the database encoding is SQL_ASCII.

I don't believe that. With C locale, the convert() works fine as I
described.
--
Tatsuo Ishii
SRA OSS, Inc. Japan


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