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[-] jordanlund@lemmy.world 176 points 1 year ago

Emojis are known to break systems in certain circumstances due to the way they're interpreted in certain character sets.

I guarantee people doing this will not only lock out their own accounts, but may even freeze some authentication servers.

https://www.pcmag.com/news/want-to-brick-an-iphone-send-some-emojis

https://www.itechpost.com/articles/75762/20170119/brick-iphone-using-emojis-plus-tricks-dont-know.htm

[-] abhibeckert@lemmy.world 51 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

The website should feed your password straight into a well known hashing algorithm or key derivation function that has undergone a decade or more of careful scrutiny, without any other processing. The output will usually be a fixed length base64 or hex string.

There's a short list of about three options that are currently considered acceptable, and a few more are probably fine but are a little too easy to crack these days (e.g. anything that shares the same math as bitcoin... what if someone throws a mining datacentre at your password?)

If the site breaks, maybe you don't to be a customer of that service.

[-] NightAuthor@lemmy.world 18 points 1 year ago

Can you still log in to wellsfargo accounts using the T9 translation of your password?

[-] Vilian@lemmy.ca 8 points 1 year ago

make one account with emoji password to test their system, if it break, good, go create hour account somewhere else

[-] lemmyvore@feddit.nl 7 points 1 year ago

It's not the processing on the server that's the problem. To reach the server the password needs to go through several layers of character encoding, if any of them fails the server will receive something different from what you meant. And when you try to login from another device and the layers will be different you'll effectively be sending a different password.

[-] ricecake@sh.itjust.works 4 points 1 year ago

The same character encoding that would break emoji would break a significant portion of the words names, so if your system can't handle it, then you deserve all the trouble that you run into.

Unicode isn't that hard.

[-] Dark_Arc@social.packetloss.gg 1 points 1 year ago

You're not wrong, but some systems, especially smaller ones are intended for English-only situations (or originally were) so non-English language situations might not be as well tested and/or may cause things to break.

Remember there are some sites that still refuse service if you put a " in your password. I'm not saying it's right, but it's a definite possibility.

[-] lolcatnip@reddthat.com 1 points 1 year ago
[-] Dark_Arc@social.packetloss.gg 1 points 1 year ago

That is very much not a 90s problem. Especially if the company has a website and an app or is a small company not thinking about these things.

In theory this shouldn't be an issue but it definitely could be an issue on certain services.

[-] Arin@kbin.social 27 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

auth servers breaking from emojis would be hilarious, pretty sure that's why older auth servers only allow certain symbols in passwords

[-] jordanlund@lemmy.world 35 points 1 year ago

"Your password '🤣umådbrø⁉️' is breaking our server. Please change it."

[-] mindlight@lemm.ee 9 points 1 year ago

"Of course. What is the server's root password?"

[-] Kusimulkku@lemm.ee 15 points 1 year ago

If some auth server breaks because I put emojis in my password then that's right and deserved

[-] 50gp@kbin.social 6 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

and there are many trash implementations that dont recognise something like :emoticon: as shortcut and turn it into emoji, no no you have to use emoji keyboard to type them

[-] lolcatnip@reddthat.com 4 points 1 year ago

OTOH, there is only one character set that matters, and any system using a different one is, by that fact alone, broken.

[-] jordanlund@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago
[-] lolcatnip@reddthat.com 4 points 1 year ago

I said only one that matters. So I already did pick one. It's called Unicode.

[-] jordanlund@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago

UTF-8 and UTF-16 pretty much do everything, but if you have a UTF-16 emoji in a UTF-8 system, you'll have a bad day. :(

[-] lolcatnip@reddthat.com 4 points 1 year ago

Those are encodings, not character sets.

[-] jordanlund@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago

IANA calls them character sets, it's literally in the URL twice, that's good enough for me!

[-] rafa@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago

No need to tell us how you feel every day

[-] Salamendacious@lemmy.world 3 points 1 year ago

That only applies to iphones that came out 2016 or earlier and we're never updated right?

[-] Funwayguy@lemmy.world 24 points 1 year ago

Hahaha, I wish.

You would be amazed at how ancient and poorly maintained many web servers are on the modern internet. SQL injection still consistently make the top 3 web app vulnerabilities as of 2021. If that isn't being sanitized properly I don't expect emojis would be handled much better.

[-] Salamendacious@lemmy.world 4 points 1 year ago

Thanks I wasn't aware of that

[-] jordanlund@lemmy.world 7 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

For that particular bug, yes, but there have been many other variations on that theme and not limited to Apple tech. I've seen it nuke an email send for example because the SMTP server choked on emojis placed in a subject, to, or from line.

[-] Salamendacious@lemmy.world 3 points 1 year ago

Thanks I appreciate the clarification

this post was submitted on 03 Nov 2023
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