What to do about libidn?

[Florian Weimer]

On 11/08/2016 04:27 PM, Zack Weinberg wrote:

> I just saw something go by about security problems with blindly
> applying IDNA-2008 without additional input validation, too. Can't
> find it right now.  cc:ing the libidn(2) maintainer.

The upgrade to IDNA-2008 changes name resolution for some domains 
because registries did not handle the transition in a seamless manner. 
It also enables new homograph attacks (but I tend to discount those as 
irrelevant).

Disabling IDNA does not have this problem anymore because I don't think 
there is a registry which allows registration of non-ASCII name (e.g., 
labels of the form \195\164\195\182\195\188 instead of xn--4ca0bs).

>> What should we do to improve this situation?  I would really like to remove
>> AI_IDN, but this is likely not an option.
>
> I also rather like the idea of dropping AI_IDN.  As a data point,
> https://searchcode.com/?q=AI_IDN shows only 39 hits out of "20 billion
> lines of code from 7,000,000 projects" - and at least half of those
> appear to be implementations and library wrappers.

There is traceroute …

If we the consensus is that we want to get rid of AI_IDN, I'll happily 
prepare a patch (and use it in Fedora).

Thanks,
Florian