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this post was submitted on 03 Nov 2023
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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
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.
Can you still log in to wellsfargo accounts using the T9 translation of your password?
make one account with emoji password to test their system, if it break, good, go create hour account somewhere else
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.
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.
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.It's not the 90s anymore.
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.
auth servers breaking from emojis would be hilarious, pretty sure that's why older auth servers only allow certain symbols in passwords
"Your password '🤣umådbrø⁉️' is breaking our server. Please change it."
"Of course. What is the server's root password?"
If some auth server breaks because I put emojis in my password then that's right and deserved
Sounds like a crappy implementation of the authentication server then, and the sysadmin deserves a paddlin' for not stripping non-UTF characters (or making sure they work).
My problem with using emojis as part of the password would rather be that while I might be able to enter them on my personal Android phone using the exact keyboard app I have installed right now, I might find myself struggling on a desktop computer or any other phone that doesn't have this exact keyboard installed. After all, the graphical representation of the same emoji might look different there, and there is a chance I couldn't even recognize it.
So if anything, I'd say use a non-UTF keyboard like Thai or Chinese, but then a standard character in that specific type. Keyboards layout can be installed across devices and are fully standardized, even if the same character looks slightly different.
Stripping characters from passwords, great idea! Right up there with truncating passwords that are too long.
That's not how any of this works.
First of all, stripping passwords is never okay. You can reject the password and let the user choose a new one, but never just modify it on your own.
Then, if your system is at risk of code injection by certain characters in user input, please just shut it down and never turn it on again.
Doing that is actually a great way to tell attackers that you're vulnerable to that type of attack.
Bypassing those front end restrictions is super easy, and the attackers don't need an account or a password to attack you.
It's like putting a sign that says "lock fragile; don't tug" on the door to your business.
That one made me chuckle, it really do be like that 😂
Learn how to sanitise your database inputs first, damnit!
https://xkcd.com/327/
also some OSKs put whitespaces after inserting an emoji, some doesn't. there's no unified emoji input method yet.
There's no such thing as a non-UTF8 character. You mean non-UTF8 bytes? If a system sees those, it should reject the entire input, not try to patch it up.
OTOH, there is only one character set that matters, and any system using a different one is, by that fact alone, broken.
Pick one :)
https://www.iana.org/assignments/character-sets/character-sets.xhtml
I said only one that matters. So I already did pick one. It's called Unicode.
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. :(
Those are encodings, not character sets.
IANA calls them character sets, it's literally in the URL twice, that's good enough for me!
No need to tell us how you feel every day
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
Well you actually make your password a lot stronger if it doesn't replace :emoticon: with a single UTF character. (N_utf)^(len+1) is almost certainly smaller than (N_ascii)^(len+10) with N_utf ~= 200k, N_ascii = 94 ; the latter beats the former at len=6
That only applies to iphones that came out 2016 or earlier and we're never updated right?
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.
Thanks I wasn't aware of that
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.
Thanks I appreciate the clarification