CVE-2021-42574

Related Vulnerabilities: CVE-2021-42574  

A flaw was found in the way Unicode standards are implemented in the context of development environments, which have specialized requirements for rendering text. An attacker could exploit this to deceive a human reviewer by creating a malicious patch containing well placed BiDi characters. The special handling and rendering of those characters can be then used in an attempt to hide unexpected and potentially dangerous behaviour from the reviewer.

Description

A flaw was found in the way Unicode standards are implemented in the context of development environments, which have specialized requirements for rendering text. An attacker could exploit this to deceive a human reviewer by creating a malicious patch containing well placed BiDi characters. The special handling and rendering of those characters can be then used in an attempt to hide unexpected and potentially dangerous behaviour from the reviewer.

Statement

This is a flaw with the way Unicode standards are implemented in the context of development environments, which have specialized requirements for rendering text. This is not a flaw in Red Hat products.

This is a flaw with the way Unicode standards are implemented in the context of development environments, which have specialized requirements for rendering text. This is not a flaw in Red Hat products.

Additional Information

  • Bugzilla 2005819: CVE-2021-42574 Developer environment: Unicode's bidirectional (BiDi) override characters can cause trojan source attacks
  • CWE-838: Inappropriate Encoding for Output Context
  • FAQ: Frequently asked questions about CVE-2021-42574