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it can be used to create malicious pull requests that are visually indistinguishable from correct ones

• dragonwriter 8y ago
  > it can be used to create malicious pull requests that are visually indistinguishable from correct ones If your only check on the correctness of submitted code is visual inspection, you've got a much bigger problem than Unicode confusability.
  • saagarjha 8y ago
    How do you check your code? Presumably, you’re not able to exercise the full range of inputs, so at some point you will have to look at the code and figure out what it is doing…
    • heartbreak 8y ago
      Which means you'd notice the value of a constant being exfiltrated, since a maliciously named constant doesn't magically expose secrets outside of the application.
      • majewsky 8y ago
        I suggest you take a look at some of the submissions in e.g. the Underhanded C Contest. Where it can be excruciatingly hard to figure out where the backdoor is even though you know that the code has one.
  • phendrenad2 8y ago
    Do you apply formal verification to your codebases to make sure there are to cleverly-crafted backdoors that still pass all the unit tests? Would be interesting to hear about.