What Does Canonical Mean, and Why Is It a Problem?

What Does Canonical Mean, and Why Is It a Problem?

I had no idea what canonical meant the first time I heard the term. The only canon I had heard was Johann Pachelbel s (1653 1706) glorious Canon in D Major. The entry for canonical in Random House Webster s College Dictionary (Random House, 2000) reads, Canonical: in its simplest or standard form. Hence, the canonical representation of something is the standard, most direct, and least ambiguous way to represent it. Canonicalization is the process by which various equivalent forms of a name are resolved to a single, standard name the canonical name. For example, on a given machine, the names c:\dir\test.dat, test.dat, and ..\..\test.dat might all refer to the same file. And canonicalization might lead to the canonical representation of these names being c:\dir\test.dat. Security bugs related to canonicalization occur when an application makes wrong decisions based on a noncanonical representation of a name.



Writing Secure Code
Writing Secure Code, Second Edition
ISBN: 0735617228
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2005
Pages: 153

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