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Mitigating Trojan Source Attacks

The Trojan Source Attack, tracked as CVE-2021-42574, and disclosed on , works by using invisible unicode characters used to control interpretation of text as left-to-right or right-to-left to craft malicious source code which appears to function in one way, but is compiled in another. Code which seems to be valid could be commented out.

Figures 3 and 4 from Trojan Source Invisible Vulnerabilities by Nicholas Boucher and Ross Anderson

Figures 3 and 4 from “Trojan Source: Invisible Vulnerabilities” by Nicholas Boucher and Ross Anderson

Atlassian has updated Bitbucket to highlight these characters in pull requests and source code view to make it more obvious when one of these characters has been inserted into your source code: Multiple Products Security Advisory - Unrendered unicode bidirectional override characters - CVE-2021-42574.

Bitbuckets mitigation for Trojan Source attacks highlights the hidden characters for reviewers.

Bitbucket’s mitigation for Trojan Source attacks highlights the hidden characters for reviewers.

But what if you want to prevent these characters from being committed, or automatically audit your Bitbucket instance for this attack? Security for Bitbucket offers a preconfigured rule to find and block these potential attacks.

For more information on the vulnerability, you can visit Trojan Source Attacks and read the paper.

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