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Showing posts from March, 2023

Beware of Java's String.getBytes

Sometimes there are subtle bugs whose origin can be found in some quirks from the underlying language used to build the software. This blog post describes one of those cases in order to let both fellow security researchers and developers, who didn't know about it, become aware of this potential vulnerable pattern. In fact, I'm pretty sure that similar bugs to the one herein described likely affect a bunch of products/codebases out there. In previous posts , I've already described some bugs in the Swiss Post's future E-voting system. While reading their  Crypto-Primitives specification , which among other things describes the custom Hashing algorithm Swiss Post implemented, I noticed something potentially interesting. Basically, there are 4 different types that are supported: byte arrays, strings, integers and vectors. Before being hashed, strings are converted to a byte array via the ' StringToByteArray ' algorithm. However, by comparing ' StringToByteArray