Message contains NUL characters ...

Greg A. Woods woods at weird.com
Wed May 11 16:43:26 EDT 2005


[ On Tuesday, May 10, 2005 at 22:33:43 (+0200), John Fawcett wrote: ]
> Subject: Re: Message contains NUL characters ...
>
> by the way, while looking into the code to do the patch, I saw that
> cyrus already carries out some modifications to messages (example
> removing bare \r and replacing bare \n with \r\n) so there is a
> precedent.

Note that EOL cleanups are a somewhat different issue -- if I'm not
mistaken some encapsulation methods are already able to deal with EOL
changes since this is a very common issue.  In any case one can conceive
of arguments which show that these kinds of EOL cleanups are not
destructive modifications of the message content (since EOL
modifications may be necessary to even view the message on the
recipient's system).

However finding a NUL embedded anywhere in the data is usually an
indication of either a serious bug on the sending side, or at least an
attempt to send opaque binary content of some type (which should have
been encoded somewhow and thus also indicates either a serious bug on
the sending side; or else it indicates malicious intent on the sending
side).

-- 
						Greg A. Woods

H:+1 416 218-0098  W:+1 416 489-5852 x122  VE3TCP  RoboHack <woods at robohack.ca>
Planix, Inc. <woods at planix.com>          Secrets of the Weird <woods at weird.com>
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