On Thu, Nov 21, 2024 at 10:05:49PM +0000, Richard Lewis wrote: > Marc Haber <mh+debian-de...@zugschlus.de> writes: > > > > For adduser's next release, I would like to discuss the following > > things: > > > > (1) > > Should Debian allow UTF-8 user names in the first place or should we > > restrict names for regular users to some us-ascii near set as well? (I > > think yes, we should) > > would allowing utf-8 enable some of the abuse described at > https://lwn.net/Articles/874951/ ?
> as usernames appear in logs and other output (and are passed to all > sorts of commands), it seems a bad idea to be too permissive or to > change from historic practice by default, even though from a user pov it > would be nice to have the option I am not sure about that. Would typosquatting on a user name make sense? It might be possible to make logs ambiguious. Being passed to other commands SHOULD not be dangerous since we can expect other commands to gracefully handle a byte stream, can't we? I might be naive here , but I don't have much experience with non-ascii names since I have the privilege of being fluent in two languages that use the latin alphabet. On the other side, wouldnt it be a courtesy to allow people having a name that needs transcription to be written in latin to use their name in the real alphabet that it is usually written in as a login name as well? To make things worse, transcriptions are often ambigious. I would like to hear the opinion of people who would be affected by this change. Local Administrators are able today to use UTF-8 user names in useradd or configure adduser to allow their locally important subset of UTF-8, but at the moment with things being more restrictive, our software is untested in this regard. I think that Debian would get more robust if we'd allow things here. Vulnerabilities that could be exploited by having non-ascii user names are already here and present today, just not uncovered yet. > > P.S.: The teams and inviduals working on src:shadow, base-passwd and > > adduser would appreciate your help in coding and packaging. > > Is there a list of "things that need doing"? The collaboration between src:shadow, base-passwd and adduser is a relatively fresh thing that came from the fact that src:shadow recently introduced changes that made adduser's test suite break. So we haven't yet found good paths yet. I suggested moving together as a method to improve communication and also to at least a bit reducing the bus factors of those quite important packages. That was also the reason why I suggested base-passwd to join and I am happy that Colin agreed. In adduser, nearly everything that needs doing has issues in the BTS, with the severity set to the urgency of the matter in my opinion. You'll see that adduser has quite a lot of bugs that were filed by myself. I consider it a feature to have a public to-do list. For the other two packages, I'd let their respective maintainers comment. Greetings Marc -- ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- Marc Haber | "I don't trust Computers. They | Mailadresse im Header Leimen, Germany | lose things." Winona Ryder | Fon: *49 6224 1600402 Nordisch by Nature | How to make an American Quilt | Fax: *49 6224 1600421
